Death Of A Thousand Cuts

Well 2208 actually.

Glass going in

 I'm starting to fit the double glazed units, all 276 of them.

Each piece of glass needs 4 beads (that's 1104 in total) and each bead needs at least 2 cuts (assuming I get it right first time) making 2208 cuts. That means quite a bit of time spent at the saw with a very simple jig!

A simple jig

 I measured all the glass as well so if it's wrong it's on my head. There's 14 different sizes and so far everything fits perfectly.

A lot of beads cut ready

It is a little repetitive though, one set of windows needed two lots of 112 beads at the same size - not something you want to be cutting again! Anyone else done a repetitive jobs lately?

Making Single Glazed Windows Into Double

I'll be honest - this wasn't a job I was looking forward to!
The customer wanted the 5 windows on the exposed face of his property to be changed from single glazed to double. As the windows were hardwood, of good quality and thick enough, we decided that it would be best to increase the size of the rebate (or rabbet for the Americans) where the glass sits so it could take the thicker units.

Working on the wrong side of the heater!

 This is a bit of a dirty job really every step involves dirt and dust! First we had to remove the old glass from the windows, this was done with a combination of chisels, knifes, the multimaster and a hammer! Cleaning up any broken glass before moving on to the next step.

Luckily I had Tim with me to help or it would have seemed a bit of a daunting job on my own as you couldn't rust it for fear of damaging the frames.

Removing all the old putty

Once we'd removed all the glass and cleaned up the old putty from the edges I could set about making the rebate deeper. My new little Bosch router (bought mainly for this job) was ideal as it has such a small base it could get round all the edges without hitting the walls. It was tricky to find a rebate cutter for the router with the right sized bearing to give us the correct width of cut, the ones in the set were either too big or too small but luckily I had a bearing from an old router bit set that was just the right size (shows you should throw nothing out!).

My new little router was ideal for this job - still had to have a steady handso as not to wobble

 Once I routed round each window, three of them having 16 panes of glass (this was a dusty job - I had sawdust everywhere - and I mean everywhere!) it was just a matter of tidying up the corners with a sharp chisel. I had to be careful when routing as a lot of the time the router was just resting on the thin mullion or transom and a wobble would have been really noticeable.

Cleaning up the waste in the corners

I then made some templates for the new glass and boarded up the windows.

A dirty job, but one that will make the house feel a lot warmer on this exposed site when the new glass is fitted.