Glazing is hard!

The other day, we glazed our first window pane, and boy was it hard. I’ve watched plenty of videos on the subject, and yes, it looks hard, but I wasn’t expecting it to be this hard.

In the videos, the putty seemed like plasticine or play-doh, but out of the tub it was very sticky with hard lumps in it. I tried to break the lumps up by hand, but it was taking ages and getting very messy, so I checked online, and people suggested microwaving it, which did the trick. Then it seemed even stickier and I couldn’t get it off my hands. Luckily I had some chalk powder at hand (which is one of the ingredients of putty), and that got me to the consistency I wanted.

First task was to get the glass bedded down onto the rebate, to ensure a good fit and seal. A bead of putty is added to the rebate, the glass is inserted and pressed down to squeeze out any excess, which is trimmed off with my fancy putty knife. After a dusting with pumice powder, to remove any excess oil from the glass, it did start to look okay.

Back to the glass side again, I made a mess of applying the bead of putty, but I know this will clean up. The problem I had was having was getting a nice chamfer on the putty, which seems to come down to getting the right pressure and angle of the knife. The corners took me a while but eventually I had it complete.

On the videos, the experts glaze a pane in about 10 minutes, it took me well over an hour but in the end it looked pretty decent. As recommended when using linseed oil, putty and paint, I immediately dusted the putty with chalk and then painted it. You’ll see that I painted on the glass as well, this is to give the putty a good seal against the glass, with any excess removed with a razor blade once the paint has cured.

Overall I think I scored a ‘C’ on my first attempt and no doubt I’ll get better and faster,
though today I couldn’t get the chamfer correct at all and had to scrape off all the putty, very frustrating. Not sure I like glazing.