Hello....I hope someone can give me some sensible advice here.
I have 4 older (80 years old or so) roughly 20x30 inch beveled glass windows that we removed from an older home we owned with the intention of installing them into a new home we built 15 years ago. I am finally getting around to installing these.
When we removed them from the old home, they were in an exterior wall seperating the home interior and the front porch of the house. After many years of getting very warm in the summers on the front facing porch, the heavy bevels were sagging a great deal on the bottom -- up to 1 inch out of the plane of the glass. We removed them very carefully an brought them into a stained glass specialist for repair. These folks "flattened" the glass, repairing some of the caming, and then they "wrapped" the perimeter of the sheets with additional came, kind of an I-beam shape on the cross-section, which helped stabilize the whole perimeter.
We havent had a place to use these until now. We are building a corner gas fireplace into our walkout lower level of our home. We intend to flank the fireplace with two bookcase style units on either side, about 33 inches wide. I would like to build doors to cover the bookcase units, and I would use the beveled glass panes in the doors. The panes are gorgeous (at least they were in the old house), particularly when backlit, which I intend to do from the cases.
Questions:
1) do you think I should "sandwich" the beveled glass between two sheets of clear glass, to ease cleaning and to protect against sagging? 2) if I do this, should I use tempered glass, or do you think window glass would suffice? 3) these glass panels are heavy, and will be moreso if i do any "sandwiching"; how heavy should I construct the oak frame around the panes? I am planning on using 1X3 and might layer it in 3 courses for 2 1/4 thickness. Is that adequate? Is it overkill? 4) what kind of corner joint should I use to prevent sagging of the frame? If I alternately layer 3 1X3s and maybe drill/screw/plug the corners and glue them with Gorilla glue, will that be adequate? 5) should I use any kind of "pad" inside the frames to float the glass a bit?Any other thoughts or suggestions?
Thanks,
Tim (remove "DoesntWantSpam" from my email address to respond by email)