How was glass made

[Jeff99]

As time goes on various glasses are getting harder to find. I would like to start a forum that deals with how glass was originally made by the manufacturers and how reproduction glass can be successfully made by a restorer.

Regards
Jeff   

[stayouttadabunker]

Reel glasses for example, have chrome lines surrounding the windows.
They way they applied that chrome - is etching it directly to the plate glass electrically with copper.
Glass etching in itself is an art.

They do some translucent shading too on various award/belly glasses as well to pop out the colors -
to allow more fluorescent lighting to shine through highlighting certain areas of the glass.

Look at a Tabasco reel glass...definitely one of the prettier matching themed machine glass IMO.
It totally matches the rest of the glass on the machine and the art work is fairly extensive.
It's one of the main reasons that particular game/glass kit commanded a good price on the home market over the years.

The newest video games are heavily moving away from beautiful slot machine glass artwork
and concentrating more on the video graphics presentation on dual LCD screens nowadays.

Below are examples of both a Tabasco reel glass and how a Williams BBII dual LCD screen is
changing the way the newest machines are presented...>>>

[knagl]

Older slot machine glasses would have been made with a silkscreening process, much like older pinball glass:

http://tuukan.fliput.net/taide_en.html

http://tuukan.fliput.net/bglass_en.html

I'm not sure on the methods used on newer glass, although I think it involves printing on a thin plastic film which is then adhered to the back of the glass.  Newer pinball machines use translites inserted behind a sheet of glass (but typically not adhered like it is on a slot machine glass).

Clay (member "cfh" on here) had some decent success working with a local shop to have some reproduction "glass" (actually, he used Plexiglas) made for some games a while back.  It'd be interesting to find out exactly how he had it made.