"The Tile Saw - The Kilnformer's Friend"
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Using the saw
The basic use is quite obvious – you place the glass on the platform and move it through the blade. You will need to adjust the height of the blade so that it will cut all the way through the glass. Always make certain that the pump is working and that a good spray of water is hitting the blade and glass at all times while cutting. Push the glass through the blade slowly to avoid chipping the edges and jamming up the blade. Make sure the glass is well supported so that the cut-off pieces don’t fall off the platform after the cut has been made.
One of the most common problems during the cutting process is the development of a large chip at the very last few millimeters of the cut. This chipping can be minimized by going slowly, pushing the two sides of the glass together at the very end of the cut, and placing something on the surface of the platform to absorb vibrations (such as thick, rubber shelf covering material).
Creating perfect square corners from rounded edges on a fused piece of glass:
The tile saw can quickly make straight, clean edges from a kilnformed piece that did not end up exactly square, or that has rounded corners from the fusing process. Simply use the saw to trim off the rounded edges from the glass, and assure that the corners are square using a metal L-square. You can mark the lines you want to cut using a permanent marker, and protect those lines from washing away under the water spray using paste wax or Chapstick©.
Cutting Pattern Bars into slices:
The tile saw is the easiest way to accurately and cleanly cut a Pattern Bar into even slices. Just set up a guide on the platform (you can use a C-clamp to hold the guide in place if your saw didn’t come with an adjustable stop). Adjust the guide to the width you want your Pattern Bar slice to be, and cut through the glass slowly and steadily.
Cutting fused pieces and reassembling them into new designs.
The tile saw makes it easy to cut cleanly and accurately through a prefused piece of glass. Consider making several 1/4 inch thick pieces of patterned glass, then sawing the patterned pieces into shapes that can be tightly fit together to form new patterns in a final piece.
Cutting thick pieces and using the cut edge as the display side
Sometimes the edges of fused glass are as interesting as the flat surfaces. Using the tile saw, a pre-fused slab can be cut into 3/8” wide strips, which can be rotated so the cut side is up; reassembled and fused again.
Many useful tools are needed for coldworking kilnformed glass. The three most useful are the wet belt sander, sandblaster, and tile saw The tile saw is a very valuable addition to the armamentarium of tools for the kilnformer, and I hope this article has given you enough basic information to purchase one, and begin using it.
For those of you interested in the ultimate tile saw modifications, see this pdf written by Phil Hoppes.