
Making a Menger sponge in stained glass - sohkamyung
http://joshmillard.com/sgmenger/
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michaelbuckbee
My mom made some really amazing stained glass projects when I was a kid and
I've always been fascinated by it. Recently I had the thought that the process
could be singnificantly sped by using CNC/Waterjets or something else to help
with the really time consuming cutting and fitting aspects.

I've found a few instances where people have used CNC cutters with a diamond
drag bit to help score the glass, and a few industrial glass cutting
applications of similar to stained glass size items, but no real start to
finish projects.

This is an interesting industrial example as they were able to produce a
stained glass piece that is made almost entirely from curved pieces (a near
impossibility with traditional scoring and breaking) -
[https://semyx.com/solutions/waterjet-
applications/glass/](https://semyx.com/solutions/waterjet-applications/glass/)

Industrial waterjet glass cutting:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_qMKKwvzz8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_qMKKwvzz8)

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dfc
> almost entirely from curved pieces (a near impossibility with traditional
> scoring and breaking)

I was a little surprised when I read this because it means the people at my
local makerspace are magicians. There are tons of examples of curved stained
glass as well as a lot of howtos on how to do it. The came glasswork page on
wikipedia is full of stained glass with curves:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Came_glasswork](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Came_glasswork)

What am I missing?

~~~
Gibbon1
What you're missing is glass grinders (router) and band saws. Grinders use
diamond abrasive bits and flood cooling. Glass bandsaws same deal. With those
you can shape flat pieces any shape you want.

~~~
dfc
But you can also cut curved glass with traditional glass scoring? And this has
been so for a long time.

~~~
Gibbon1
I tried that a couple of times, can be done. Takes skill I don't really have.

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joshmillard
Well, hey, that's me! Howdy folks.

~~~
daeken
Love the design, but I'm kind of envious of how easy you made this look! Haha.
My wife and I got super into stained glass work for a while there, and while
she kept getting better, I never really did. It's hard to do it well, so mad
props to you for making it look so easy!

~~~
joshmillard
I was surprised and please how much I took to it, honestly; I went in cold and
was prepared to not really get a knack for it.

But easy-looking is also a product of writing it up after the fact, and
learning under good instruction; it was still a solid 20+ hours of work with a
fair amount of cursing and bits of messing up and redoing stuff.

In any case, whether or not I caught on quicker than average, the process
itself feels very accessible to me. I can recommend giving it a shot a lot
more readily than I'd have guessed before I tried it myself.

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xutopia
My father did a lot of stained glass window when I was young. When we moved
countries he couldn't take it up again for lack of funds but I have fond
memories geeking out with him about it. He would draw amazing things with it
and I wished that it was more prevalent today. Stained glass can be absolutely
beautiful.

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swiley
Working with glass really is a lot of fun and isn’t particularly hard. I
didn’t realize how easy it was until I started messing with chemistry.

The material is absolutely amazing and we still don’t know everything about
it.

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pault
That is stunning! The part about copper and solder got me wondering if it
would be possible to create some primitive circuits for... something?

~~~
dsr_
Glass is a perfectly good circuit board material. Here's a company offering it
commercially:

[http://www.hoyaoptics.com/gcb/index.htm](http://www.hoyaoptics.com/gcb/index.htm)

~~~
moftz
That is pretty neat, it's essentially a macroscale version of a CMOS process.

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ndesaulniers
Menger sponges are neat! I once wrote up some code to procedurally generate
them for 3d rendering.

[https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/prims/blob/master/sponge....](https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/prims/blob/master/sponge.js)

(See readme for a rendering)

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StreakyCobra
Fun fact: I was seeing pyramids in the center of faces on all pictures until I
searched online to look what is a menger sponge!

~~~
joshmillard
Yeah, this isometric rendering has nice hints of Necker Cube illusions to it.

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uranium
That's lovely; amazing that it was just your first project. Thanks for the
detailed walk-through. My mom did stained glass before I was born, but I never
got to see it done, so it was really cool to be able to see it grow step-by-
step.

~~~
joshmillard
It's a shockingly approachable medium! I was really surprised at how much it
_wasn 't_ a series of frustrating technical or fiddly bits.

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caiobegotti
That's some very HN material! I would totally buy a copy piece of that, great
explanation about each step of the process too! :-)

