RickH wrote:
On Dec 7, 11:23 am, "hr(bob) "
wrote:
I have a 15 year-old glass SEARS fireplace door, made up of four door
sections, each section is about 8" wide by 20" high, with a metal
frame around each door. Two doors on each side with a piano type
hinge between the pair of doors, and two pin type hinges at the
outside points. Last night, while reading on the sofa in the family
room, with the fire slowly getting lower as I was letting it burn down
for the night, I heard what sounded like a cap gun type of noise.
When I looked up, one of the four door glass panes had shattered into
small shards. It was obviously tempered glass by the way it broke
up.

I took the shards out of the frame today, and the frame is not warped
and shows no signs of anything that could have triggered the
breakage. The glass is about 7/16" thick. The fire was burning very
low, and there were no sparks or anything that I am aware of that
triggered the breakage. Before I shell out big $$$ bucks for a new
pane of tempered glass, I want to make sure it doesn't happen again.
What would happen if I just replaced the glass with two thicknesses of
regular window glass?

Has anyone else had this sort of problem, and what did they do?

TIA,

Bob Hofmann

Check the inside edge of the frame for a screw or burr that may have
stressed it on the small edge.

Tempered glass is more sensitive to strikes/stress from the edge than
face on.

I replaced a pane in a commercial window one time, the screws that
held the frame together were so close to the glass that the second the
screw thread touched the edge as I put it back together, it
shattered. I probably could have thrown a baseball at this glass head-
on and not broken it, but the smallest concentrated inward pressure at
the edge will shatter the whole pane.




I've seen it happen with pinball machine playfield glasses. They can
take a heck of a smack of the steel ball hitting them from the inside,
people smacking their beer down on the outside, etc, but lean one
standing on edge against the wall and a grain of sand on the floor can
cause it to shatter into tiny shards.