Crystal Galleries

Hi

With a view to setting up a business in glass etching I recently had a trip to Crystal Galleries located in Middlesbrough north east England for a tuition session in using Rapid Mask, watching the videos is good but getting to know it first hand can't be beaten, I was there for around 3 hours and didn't realise how big Crystal galleries was as a business.

I was shown around by Kevin Cowey the General Manager who told me the history of the business and how one man in his shed etching glasses turned it into one of, if not the biggest suppliers of etched glasses and trophy's in Europe, plus all of the supplies required for the etcher.

From the masking

The glassware

The cabinet

And even the presentation box

Plus every bit inbetween.

I was shown all aspects of the business, from the artwork department,

to blasting, packaging and also the warehouses which hold around £800,000 of stock at any one time, got to be the biggest in Europe.

Because of such a high turnaround and big runs of etched work individual UV masks aren't cost effective and to slow, so for each design one UV washout resist is made and this is used as a screen print template. A sticky back tissue like paper is used for the resist base and a quick drying blue resist paste is silk screened onto the tissue.

Out of the multitude of items supplied by crystal probably the cheapest, was for me what I had been searching for and that was a sheet of paper, not just any paper but Folex /F laser film.

This does away with the ink jet printer and the laser is used in its stead, no more expensive printer cartridges or figuring which side is up for printing as both sides can be used.

It costs 30p a A4 sheet which in the terms of paper is pretty expensive but it can be re-used by placing the new design next to the one already printed, I have a flat bed UV unit so the paper can lie flat and the resist placed on the correct design.

So just keep your print page separate and add to it with each new design until full then start a new page.

These are my last jobs I just kept adding to and reprinting until the paper is all used.

This was a very quick process as 5, 10, 20 as many as required can quickly be screened off to create the order. Once made the wet resist goes through a dryer then another worker trims to size and its out to the glass area.

Where a group of skilled workers position the resist onto the glass which could be either trophy's, glasses or most anything then masked off and etched.

Another section of workers then remove the masking and resist before cleaning, wrapping and packaging.

The cabinets used, sold and designed by them are made by Vixen a local firm that makes some of the best blasting equipment, very good quality but a little expensive for my pocket at around £2000.

There is also a colour section where the different colours are screened onto a firing base which is then applied to the glass for kiln firing overnight, the base burns off and the colour adheres to the glass.

After my tour Kevin showed me how to make resists with both Rapid and Washout, this was very informative especially as I realised the mistakes I had been making straightaway. It firstly re-enforced what I new, in that bad art work in bad work out, the Rapid mask is so good that it picks up every detail so always have good artwork. Another mistake I was making was a to long exposure time, I was using 2 to 21/2 minutes thinking the longer the better (wrong) and combined with the large size grit I have was blasting away the detail as the long exposure time appeared to affect the adhesion of the resist, so after trying different exposure times the Rapidmask was working well from a 30 second exposure, although I still use around 1min 30secs, habit. The grit size used is from 180 to 220 which is like flour compared to what I am using.
I am now using 180 in my new cabinet which is quite fine and off course the more you use it the more it breaks down, I still have my course grit in the other cabinet for glass carving and deep etching for colour fill.

All in all it was a great to see how the pros produce all of the beautiful work with such apparent ease and many thanks to Kevin for taking the time out to show me the business.

Please help with the blog by being a contributor I'm sure the reader will appreciate.

Paul