Is 1/4" glass directional?

I've done lots of projects with glass and had it cut at my local glass shop. I am putting an antique medicine cabinet in a house I'm restoring and I needed new glass shelves for it. There was a new girl at the counter. When I gave her my measurements, I told her that I wanted 1/4" glass and my measurements were 3 1/8" by 15. Then she wanted to know what was width and what was length. I told her that as far as I knew, she had all the measurements she needed. With some eye rolling on her part, she took the order and later in the day, I got a call to pick it up and it was fine. I'm thinking she was just new or maybe a little nagging voice in my head says

*maybe* it makes a difference in what is length or width? I doubt it, but I'm throwing it out here anyway.

Perry

Reply to
Perry Templeton
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You just encountered the educated populance we now have coming out of our 21st century school system. Their brain cells are mostly rock & roll musical notes

Reply to
Jack

Maybe she want to wrap it in paper in the same direction as the width? Shame you did not need two pieces. You could have ordered a 3 x 15 and a 15 x 3. That would have confused the hell out of her.

Reply to
Edwin Pawlowski

Glass can have a grain in it from the manufacturing process although I doubt most people would ever notice it. You do take this into consideration in stained glass work but that is usually a different type of glass.

Reply to
gfretwell

The owners most likely taught her to take measurements that way.. "There was a new girl at the counter" Your own words I'm sure she will figure it out with a little experience.

Reply to
Sacramento Dave

Reply to
Bennett Price

Reply to
Perry Templeton

It sounds like a teenage girl at the cleaners, had to use a calculator to figure out the change from a $20.00 bill. Counting change up from the amount of the charges manually was taught in school when I was young, because no cash register of the day could figure it out and calculators were huge and expensive (circ. 1950s) and people didn't want to stand around while you did math on a piece of paper.

Reply to
EXT

I grind and polish telescope mirrors and in the process have learned a fair bit about glass. To the best of my knowledge, properly annealed and polished plate glass has no grain or direction. In fact the purpose of the annealing process is to remove strain (there's usually some residual strain but it's trivial).

My wife did some stained glass work and Perry is correct, some stained glass is made with ripples or ridges or surface texture. When cutting that kind of glass one must consider the direction of the surface texture. But for ordinary plate glass it doesn't matter which edge of the big sheet you cut the strip from....

Best -- Terry

Reply to
prfesser

For your next cleaning bill of, say, $17.52, give them $21.37.

Reply to
HeyBub

Reply to
Perry Templeton

Maybe when you first gave her your "measurements" she didn't realize you were talking about glass.

Reply to
lwasserm

Did she have big t*ts?

Reply to
Craven Morehead

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