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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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