*Impossible* Glass Cutting With DIY Sandblaster

hi everyone in this video i'll be showing a surprisingly easy way to cut complex shapes into glass using a homemade mini sand blaster and sand blasting cabinet i haven't seen anyone else cut glass in this way and i think the result speaks for itself now here is the mini sand blaster i've used for this project i have a whole video about making this and using it to blast fossils out of rock which i'll link to in the video description below the basic idea is you take a little metal tube available from any hardware store file a hole in the side and poke it through a tiny container with the hole facing up you use some hot glue to seal this into a vinyl tube which then connects to an air compressor blow gun and with about 60 to 100 psi in the compressor the container can be filled with sand and easily blast away rust stone or glass the most important thing about using a sand blaster is to have really good breathing protection not just an ordinary dust mask but at least a full-size respirator like this one or better yet a sand blasting cabinet like this which will keep all the dust contained inside and far away from your lungs i made this from an ordinary plastic storage bin which is perfect because it's transparent allowing you to see inside and it also has a foam gasket along the inside of the lid which ordinarily makes this bin watertight and for our purposes it will not allow any of the dust to escape you should be able to find a similar watertight storage bin in most supermarkets at least in the u.s to turn this bin into a sand blasting cabinet i drilled two big holes through the lid for my arms and i used a hole saw to do this the best way to drill these holes is to run the saw backwards so that the teeth don't actually do much cutting but instead melt through the plastic by friction alternately if you don't have a hole saw or even a drill you can take something like a soup can heat it up in a fire and just melt through the plastic with the rim of the can one more hole is made in the bin itself to attach an air filter this one is a universal filter i picked up off the shelf at my local hardware store and i secure it to the bin with a little bungee cord and a scrap piece of plastic a couple rubber bands and a stick would accomplish the same thing now you need to be able to reach your arms into the box without allowing any dust to escape so for this you'll need some long rubber gloves i started out with these yellow ones but they were a bit too short and it felt like i had little t-rex arms as i was trying to do things inside they did work but it was much better once i switched to these full arm-length gloves i purchased a few rubber couplings made for pvc pipe and once you slip them out of the metal sleeve and flip them inside out they press fit into the holes i've cut and give me a great way to push the gloves into the box and then secure them on the outside using rubber bands you could save maybe ten dollars if you didn't purchase these rubber pieces and simply taped or glued the gloves to the box directly but they really add a lot of convenience the total cost for this setup not including the air compressor is about 60 dollars and if the plastic eventually gets damaged by the sand blasting so that the bin is no longer transparent you can keep the lid and all the fittings just swap out the bin the final touch is to drill one more tiny hole for the sand blaster tube to slip through the lid and we're done now my first attempt at cutting glass with a sand blaster actually worked right away the trick is to cover whatever part of the glass you want to keep with a layer of electrical tape you can use two layers if you want to be safe but it really only takes one this is a little bit unintuitive the sandblaster can cut all the way through a solid piece of glass and yet one flimsy layer of tape is enough to protect it the trick to this is that the electrical tape is very elastic well the glass is hard and brittle think of it like this i can take a hammer and use it to break a solid brick but this same hammer swung with the same amount of force can be caught in my bare hand as long as it's not against something solid this is because my hand can absorb the hammer's energy over a longer period of time and so the impact is not as destructive when the grains of sand hit the electrical tape it absorbs some of their energy slowly but the glass being rigid can't deform and so it chips each piece of sand chips away at the glass until we've cut all the way through and this is the result of my first attempt but i've cheated to make this look like a better result than it is i sprayed this with a clear coat because before that it looked more like this not very transparent at all once i had cut through the glass all of the excess sand was bouncing around inside of the tube scuffing up the inner surface and making it opaque this also developed cracks in several places you can see the top of the tube actually broke right off i wanted a result that looked more like this no cracks and no scratching on the inside of the tube all we have to do to get this greatly superior result is take one more step in our setup that being to fill the tube with wax ordinary paraffin wax from a melted candle or canning wax from a grocery store once the wax is molten and poured into the tube as soon as it hardens up we can wrap the tube again in electrical tape and it's ready to sand blast this time the wax prevents the sand from bouncing around inside the tube and it also provides internal support so the glass doesn't develop cracks under the tape i found it also helps to cut through the glass using several shallow passes instead of blasting all the way through in one go by taking shallow passes it forces any cracks that do form to follow the path you are going to cut anyway it only took about five minutes to finish this cut and about three refills of sand i use a little scoop to refill the sand blaster with sand that is already in the box easy recycling once the cut is finished i can remove the electrical tape and a little bit of heat will melt out the wax but before doing that i decided it would be safer to break apart the inner spiral piece so it wouldn't be tangled and possibly damage my final result then i use a heat gun and the wax comes right out [Music] [Applause] to clean up any remaining wax residue you can heat a little bit of vegetable oil in a pot and let the glass piece roll around in the oil for a few minutes the wax will dissolve and then the oil cleans right off with soap and water and we're left with this pretty amazing result it would be even more amazing if instead of electrical tape i used a computer programmed vinyl cutter to cut custom images and logos into a vinyl sticker to act as the sand blasting template that would give us some interesting possibilities now i should mention my inspiration for this video came from two other channels the first was nate and callie over at the king of random they were playing with a sandblaster in a recent video and blasted all the way through a glass bottle that's where this idea finally clicked for me as i had already made this mini sandblaster in an earlier project and i knew it could etch glass but not until then did i think about using it for actual glass cutting i made a full-size sandblaster which i also tried but the mini one actually works better a lot better maybe because it's more focused it also uses much less air than a full-size sand blaster so definitely go with this the second channel that gave me some inspiration was cutter master who has a great video demonstrating a more standard glass cutting method to cut spiral shapes into wine bottles he uses a diamond cutting disc and soldering iron which gives an awesome result but it's also very meticulous and certainly takes a lot of skill to pull off using a sandblaster as i've done here is quick and easy and also lets you get sharp inside corners like this which i don't think are possible to pull off with standard scoring and heat fracturing methods by the way this method does work on larger glass bottles it just takes a little more time to carve through the thicker glass anyway i hope this video is useful and i look forward to seeing others of you put this method to use if you do give it a try post a clip to youtube and send a link to nighthawkvideoresponse gmail.com be sure to leave me comments below i still read all of them and thank you for watching i'll see you next time

Channel: NightHawkInLight

Views: 613,363

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Id: u-AZR1BJERk

Length: 10min 18sec (618 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021