Getting a grasp on how to recycle broken glass for our build

It's been a while since we last posted and it's not our intention to bore you with the many reasons for that 😅. In resume, the days are cold 🥶 and short so we've been trying to make as much progress as we can on our build while we have daylight.

Today we've decided to return to posting and while we won't take the time yet to fill you in an all we've been doing before, we'll take it from where we are in this moment: trying to recycle broken windows and glasses and making them fit into our natural building process.

We've acquired several thermopanel windows from a local shop that was willing to give us the damaged ones they had. Most of them were pretty decent and all we had to do was seal them up and place them in a way we could hide the cracks with mud. But this particular glass was too damaged and so we've been figuring out how to make use of it.

The glass of the thermopanel is joined with a glue next to a metal to give it firmness, it is super hard, we tried it with knives and it did not even move. we came up with the idea of ​​burning that glue, so we can separate them and use as much as possible.

We succeded in melting the glue but that was not enough to separate the glass from the metal frame. Out next idea was to do some markings with a glass cutter and we put it near a flame, waiting for the heat to crack it and crossing our fingers that the crack would follow the line marked with the cutter.

@fenngen ,the cutter, our friends Calcifer and the Forest

We've only recently started using the cutter more so we'll share with you a tutorial from YouTube that has some very interesting tips and shows the basic of it's usage:

During our first tries the glue stretched out like seen in the image and we were able to cut it with some effort. However, after some more experience we started getting the hang of it.

After some more time in the flame, the glass started cracking and it didn't do so in the shape we hoped, but the glue also melted a lot more giving us the chance to separate it from the rest of the structure.

We realized that when the glue takes a few minutes of heat it becomes easy to move, so on the 2nd try we were more attentive and began to slowly peel the glass from the metal with the glue. It turned out super! and we managed to rescue a good piece.

Then we proceed to do some cutting and join two glasses together with scotch tape for better insulation.

We experiment putting sticks between the 2 glasses and at the ends. Only with scotch tape, let's hope they don't come off!

The upper triangles of the walls were our biggest concern, we didn't know how we would manage to close them up while allowing light to enter as we noticed that they were vital to good lighting. However, with these primitive glass cutting techniques we were able to give them the necessary shapes to pull it off.

So that's what we're working on right now, recycling all the glasses that weren't good enough to go directly into the building. But we're guessing you'd also like to see the progress so far so here go a few pictures of that as well.

Thanks for stopping by 🥰☯️