emma_jones•18d agoProlific Poster

Question about my failed attempt at stained glass repair

I tried to fix a broken stained glass panel from a 1920s house I'm working on last weekend and it went completely wrong. The piece was about 12 inches by 8 inches with a crack through a blue section. I bought a copper foil kit and tried to solder it back together, but the old glass just shattered into three more pieces when I went to apply the foil. Turns out the glass was way more brittle than I expected after sitting for almost a hundred years. I ended up having to order a custom replacement piece from a glass shop in Portland for $85 instead of fixing it myself. Has anyone else had luck repairing old stained glass without it breaking apart on you? I'd love to know what method actually works.

3 comments

3 Comments

parker_hall518d ago

@cora_west5 sounds like that church window gave you a proper humbling too lol, old glass just does what it wants.

joseph_green1318d ago

My last attempt at fixing a 1920s church window ended with me holding just the lead frame and a lapful of glass shards. I thought I'd be slick and use some modern epoxy to patch a hairline crack, but that old glass basically rejected it like a bad organ donation. The whole panel bowed out before I even got the clamps on, and I had to tell the pastor I turned his window into a puzzle.

cora_west518d ago

You mention the glass being "way more brittle than I expected after sitting for almost a hundred years" and I used to think stained glass was basically indestructible until I tried a similar repair on an old church window. I had a small crack I thought I could handle with copper foil and a soldering iron, but the whole thing just fell apart in my hands like a stale cracker. It taught me that old glass has a lot of internal stress built up from decades of temperature changes, so now I always leave that kind of work to the pros.