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glass cutting




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From:  Bill the arcstarter [SMTP:arcstarter-at-hotmail-dot-com]
Sent:  Sunday, March 01, 1998 9:36 AM
To:  tesla-at-pupman-dot-com; eflood-at-bellsouth-dot-net
Subject:  Re: glass cutting

It was written:

>so we have a diamond edge abrasive saw that is used to cut rocks, 
>glass
>and the like.  Harold marked the glass, donned a rubber apron, a hat 
>and
>safety goggles, and turned on the saw.  He had not cut an eighth of 
>an
>inch into that glass when it literally exploded.  There was not a 
>piece
>of it left as big as a match head.  The glass was scattered all over 

I think you encountered a piece of tempered or heat-treated glass.  
Apparently this glass has some sort of mechanical stress / strain built 
into the glass, which, unfortunately, causes it to do this.  I'm told 
that the goal was to prevent the glass from fracturing into long, 
dangerous dagger-like shards upon impact.

Something like this happened to me a few years ago.  I had a rectangular 
piece of glass out of some sort of construction vehicle, which I used as 
a flat tracing surface for cutting out gaskets.  One day I was tracing a 
piece of cork with an exact-o knife, when the whole sheet of glass 
simply exploded into small 1/4 inch fragments!  About half of it ended 
up in my lap.

Fortunately I wasn't injured, but that could have been very nasty, as I 
wasn't wearing anything even remotely resembling protective clothing.

The odd thing was that for about 15 minutes, I could hear a crackling 
noise -each of the small glass chunks was still slowly forming new 
cracks and splitting apart!  Sort of like watching a hill of mexican 
jumping beans...

-Bill the arcstarter


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