Victorian Stained Glass Light with Tooled Leather Crest - Craft Tip

One of the unique challenges with this piece was the assembly of the stained glass cylinder.

A typical stained glass panel is easy to assemble. You just use a flat mdf board with push blocks or tacks to hold the glass in position and then you tack solder the glass. Tack soldering is a technique where you apply small beads of solder to the joints in the stained glass piece. You essentially are creating small spots where the pieces of glass adhere to each other. Well really, you are creating small spots where the copper foil on the pieces of glass adhere to each other, because the solder wouldn’t stick to just the glass alone.

Anyways, when you make a piece that’s 3 dimensional, such as a lampshade or in this case a 2 foot plus half cylinder you need to have the glass assembled in it’s end shape. In other words, before I could start soldering any part of this piece I had to have all 300 plus pieces of glass already in place and in the shape of the half cylinder. That’s not particularly easy since the glass isn’t inclined to just stay whereever you put it, gravity being what it is and all.

The form for my half cylinder was a piece of 4″ diameter PVC pipe cut lengthwise into 2 halves. So I needed to find a way to have all of the stained glass pieces sit in place over this PVC pipe, but also be able to remove the piece easily from the pipe once I had soldered it. My solution was electrical tape. Lots and lots of electrical tape. I laid all of the stained glass pieces out flat in the proper pattern and then ran many strips of electrical tape across the piece until I was sure I had every single one of the pieces of glass partially covered by the electrical tape. Then I very carefully picked the whole thing up and transferred it onto the PVC pipe to give it the half cylinder shape I wanted.

Once I had it on the pipe I was able to start tack soldering pieces together and gradually removed strips of electrical tape until I finally had all of the joints tack soldered together and no electrical tape left. Only then was I able to start doing the full soldering of the stained glass cylinder. Yes, it was very time consuming but the end result I think was well worth it.