A glass merchant in London that actually processes glass

What you are really buying from a glass merchant in London

If you buy glass for a living you already know the pane is the cheap part. What you are paying a glass merchant in London for is accuracy on sizes, a straight answer on lead time, and someone who carries the cost when a piece comes back wrong because they misread your list. We cut, edge, polish, toughen, laminate and make up sealed units in our own workshop at 6 Atlas Road in Wembley, which means the person who prices your cutting list works in the same building as the table it gets cut on.

This page is written for the buyer rather than the homeowner. Builders, joiners, shopfitters, kitchen fitters, maintenance contractors and other glaziers whose own furnace is full. If you need to price a job, order against it, and know what day the glass lands, the rest of this explains how that actually works.

Why a small pane is never proportionally cheap

Glass starts from a square metre rate for the product, then processing is added by operation, then there is a floor under the whole thing. The floor is the part that surprises people. Every processor works to a minimum chargeable area, because a pane the size of a hardback book still takes up a cutting table, a seaming machine, a crate slot and a space in the van in much the same way a large one does. Ask for one tiny piece and you will be charged as though it were considerably bigger. That is not a merchant being awkward, it is the honest cost of handling glass.

The second thing driving price is yield. Glass arrives as large stock sheets and your list gets optimised across them. Sensible rectangles nest well and very little goes to the cullet bin. One long thin piece, one near square piece and one odd shape can waste a third of a sheet, and that waste is inside your price whether anyone itemises it or not. If you have any flexibility on a dimension, say so when you send the list. We will sometimes tell you that moving a size by twenty or thirty millimetres drops the cost, because it lets two pieces come out of the same strip.

Processing is charged by operation and not by panel. A cut piece with arrised edges is one thing. Flat ground, then flat polished, then radius corners, then two holes, then a hinge cut-out, then toughened, then back into a sealed unit, and you have stacked seven operations with seven set-ups. This is why two quotes on what looks like identical glass can be a long way apart. One has priced polished edges all round and the other has priced arrised. Read the specification line, not the total.

Toughening is the one most buyers misread. A toughening furnace is loaded as a bed, not as a pane. The oven runs the same cycle, burns the same gas and takes the same time whether it is half empty or packed tight. So the economics are about how well your pieces fill a load and whether your thickness matches what is already going through. Six pieces of 6mm clear sitting alongside someone else’s bed of 6mm clear is cheap. One sheet of thick low iron on its own is not, and no amount of pushing changes the physics. When a supplier prices toughened differently from plain cut to size, that is the reason.

If the price of a small pane looks disproportionate, you are not being overcharged. You are seeing the minimum cost of handling glass with nothing larger to hide behind.

How do I write a cutting list that never gets queried?

Most remakes do not come from bad cutting. They come from a list that can be read two ways. The table cuts what is written down. If a line says 900 x 1200 and nothing says which figure is which, somebody has to decide, and on a toughened panel with a hinge cut-out that decision costs you a week.

• Width first, then height, labelled as such, on every single line
• Thickness, product and finish spelled out: 6mm toughened clear, 6.4mm laminated, 4mm low iron. Not just safety glass
• Edge work per piece, and whether it applies to all four edges or only the ones on show
• Which face is the room side wherever there is a coating, a mirror backing, a satin finish or a print
• Hole and cut-out positions dimensioned from one named corner, with diameter and whether countersunk
• Quantity, and whether a pair is handed, meaning the second piece is a mirror image rather than a copy
• The tolerance you can live with, and whether the opening is fixed or you can pack it

Say what the glass is going into as well. A piece bound for a timber rebate with ten millimetres of cover can be cut tight. A piece dropping into a finished aluminium channel with four millimetres of cover needs the deduction taken off before it is cut, and you want it agreed in advance who takes it off. That is thirty seconds on the phone against a remake and a lost fitting day.

Ask what is on the rack this week, not what is in the range

Every supplier’s product list is longer than its stock. Clear float in the common thicknesses, basic toughened, standard laminate and the usual low emissivity coating move constantly and are almost always there. Low iron, acoustic laminate, heavier toughened, fire rated, patterned, bronze and grey tints, mirror and anything coated for solar control are brought in and run on a longer clock. The useful question is never whether we can supply something. It is whether it is on the rack this week.

That single question changes how you quote. If a client has set their heart on an obscure pattern for a bathroom screen and it is a special order, the lead time belongs in your programme and in your conversation with them before you take any money. If they will accept a satin finish we hold, you could be fitting it on Friday.

Lead time, broken down honestly

Lead time is not one number. It is the sum of the processes your job needs, and every process has its own clock. Cut to size from stock with arrised or ground edges normally moves in a day or two depending on the queue. Polished edges and shaped work add a pass on a machine that is also working through everybody else’s list.

Toughening runs when there is a bed to run, so it moves in batches rather than hours. Anything that comes out of the furnace and then has to become a sealed unit has a second stage after that, because the unit is assembled, sealed and then left to cure before it is fit to travel. Put a special order sheet on the front of all that and you are talking in weeks, not days.

Nobody serious promises same day on toughened, and you should question anyone who does. What you can reasonably expect is a date you can build a programme around and a phone call the moment that date moves. The second half of that matters more than the first.

The cheapest line on a cutting list quote

When three quotes come back on the same list and one is noticeably under the others, the gap is almost never generosity. Usually something has been read down. Arrised instead of polished. Annealed where you specified toughened. A standard float where you asked for low iron, which on a white kitchen splashback will show as a green cast at every exposed edge. Or the quote excludes delivery and you find out on the day.

Price the job on what the specification says, then look at who will stand behind it. A remake on a toughened panel with cut-outs is a week of your programme, a second visit, and a conversation with a client who no longer trusts your dates. The few pounds saved on the first order rarely survives that.