Crown & cylinder glass

[Feltwell]

Do I remember someone on here saying that crown glass is no longer produced, and cylinder is only available from Poland?

I was taking a break today and watched a programme called "Industrial Revelations", all about trades in Birmingham in the 1800's. To cut a long story short they showed a company called the English Antique Glass Company who demonstrated making both crown and cylinder glass, as it would have been used for glazing.

Their website is mostly about art glass, but if anyone is in need of crown or wants English-made cylinder they may be worth a call.

http://www.englishantiqueglass.co.uk/

 

[biffvernon]

Er, well, it's been a couple of years since I've spoken with them but I doubt that the situation has changed. They did some experiments in making crown glass and did, indeed, succeed in spinning some sheets about three feet in diameter. They were, however, rather thick, very seedy and striated and really would not have passed muster for window glass. This picture from their website is similar to some of the sheets I saw.

It's fine for 'art glass' but not plain glazing. They said there were also insurmountable elf n safely problems involved with holding a heavy sheet of glass in front of an open kiln for annealing! You just can't do that sort of thing these days.

So, to the best of my knowledge, no, crown glass is no longer available because we've lost the know-how.

Mouth blown cylinder glass, made in Poland, is available from Tatra Glass in Loughborough. Nice stuff, I use a fair bit of it (£80 a time if you drop a sheet!).

 

[Feltwell]

The crown glass they showed on the telly looked better than that, but the camera didn't exactly linger for long so I didn't see it that well. Yes, the elfin safety looked pretty dire for how it was manufactured, I can understand them not wanting to do it!

Do you travel to Loughborough to get your glass then Biff? It's getting hold of the stuff locally that I've found to be a problem - which has so far mostly forced me to use modern float glass . I had a look at Horticultural grade glass but what I've seen is as imperfection-free as float glass.

Mind you, the last piece of float I had cut, once I got it home I realised it had a fault and had a line running right across it - I didn't take it back!

 

[biffvernon]

Tatra glass will post small quantities and deliver in their van if you buy several hundred quids worth at a time. Talk to them.