A cutting and processing workshop

A glass cutting service in London that actually cuts the glass

Glass Cut To Size is the cut-glass side of a London glazing company that runs its own cutting and processing workshop at 6 Atlas Road, Wembley HA9 0JH. We cut, edge, polish, drill, toughen and laminate glass there, and we make up sealed units there too. When you ring with a list of sizes you are talking to the place the glass gets made, not to a desk that forwards the order elsewhere.

That matters more than it sounds. A good many firms advertising a glass cutting service in London are buying processed glass in from a trade processor and adding a margin, which is a perfectly legitimate business but puts two companies between you and the cutting table. Ask a factored supplier why a size came back half a millimetre out, whether a particular obscure pattern can be toughened, or whether a hole can sit closer to an edge than the rule of thumb allows, and they have to ring somebody and call you back. A glass merchant that cuts to size on its own premises walks to the machine and looks.

How an order actually moves through the workshop

It starts with the information, not the glass. Somebody reads your list and checks it against the things that cause remakes: whether the sizes are final or still an aperture, whether the thickness suits the span, whether holes sit too near an edge or a corner, whether the pattern you have asked for will take the treatment you have asked for, and which face is the face side. If something does not add up we ring you then, before any glass is cut, because that is the only cheap moment to fix it.

Then the sheet gets broken down on the cutting table, the pieces go through the edging machines to the finish on the order, holes and notches are drilled and milled, and anything destined for toughening is checked over before it is loaded, because the furnace is the point of no return. Toughened pieces come out, cool, get marked and are inspected again. Everything is wrapped, separated and labelled with the reference you gave it, which is exactly why we ask for piece names rather than a column of sizes.

Then it either goes on the rack for collection or onto a vehicle for delivery. Either way it travels on edge, padded and separated, because that is the only sensible way to move glass around London.

Standards, marking and the paperwork you should expect

Toughened glass we supply is made to BS EN 12150 and carries the permanent mark identifying it as toughened safety glass. Laminated is to BS EN 14449. Safety glass for critical locations is impact tested to BS 6206 Class A or the corresponding class in BS EN 12600, and the mark is what proves it, which is why we will not grind a mark off to make a pane look tidier, however small and however much somebody wants us to.

If you are a builder signing off a job, or a homeowner who will sell the house one day, ask whoever supplies your glass to put the specification in writing on the paperwork: type, thickness, make-up, standard and the location it is going into. We put it on ours. A building control officer, a surveyor or a buyer's solicitor can and does ask what the glass in a door panel is, and shrugging at that question later is expensive.

On the installation side, the company is a FENSA registered installer and fits with its own teams rather than subcontracting work out to whoever is available that week. Replacement window and door work therefore comes with the registration and certification that goes with it. Cut glass supply and installation are separate services and you are welcome to use either on its own. A large number of our customers only ever buy glass from us and fit it themselves, and that is a perfectly good way to use this workshop.

What we will not do

Some of this is law, some of it is experience, and all of it has saved somebody money at some point.

• We will not cut, drill or trim toughened glass after treatment, because it cannot be done, and anyone who tells you otherwise is about to break your pane
• We will not supply plain float for a critical location, even when plain float is what came out of the frame
• We will not cut to sizes you have told us you are unsure of. We will ask you to measure again, template it, or book a survey
• We will not sell you twelve millimetre glass for a cabinet door, low-iron for a black splashback, or a bevel on an edge that a frame is going to cover
• We will not pretend that one pane of solar control glass will fix an overheating conservatory

That last one comes up every summer. The honest answer is usually a properly specified sealed unit, or shading, or both, and occasionally the answer is that the roof is the problem and the glass is innocent.

Working with trade

Builders, joiners, kitchen fitters, shopfitters and other glaziers account for a large share of what goes through the shop, and the relationship runs differently from a one-off homeowner order. Trade customers send a cutting list, get it priced, then collect or take a delivery to site. They tend to order by piece reference because their job is already drawn, and they want to know two things from us: is the list achievable as drawn, and when can they have it.

If you are running several sites across London, tell us at the order stage rather than on the morning of the delivery. Pieces for different addresses get separated and labelled differently, and a driver with three drops and three site contacts is far more use than one who discovers at the second address that half the load belongs somewhere else entirely.

We are also happy to be the awkward voice on a drawing. If a joiner has specified a shelf span that will bow, or a designer has put a fixing hole twenty millimetres from a corner, we would rather raise it at quotation stage than make the pane, watch it break in the furnace, and make it again a week later.

Surveys, quotations and what we charge for

On a supply-only order, measuring is the customer's responsibility, and that is the deal throughout the trade: we cut to your figures. If you would rather not carry that risk, we offer a free site survey across London, and then the sizes are ours. For anything structural, anything shaped, a shopfront, a staircase or a full set of shower glass, that is usually the sensible choice, and the survey is where most of the awkward discoveries get made.

Quotations are written and fixed against a specification rather than being a range that drifts upwards once work starts. If the specification changes because you have changed the glass or the sizes, the price changes, and we will tell you by how much before we proceed rather than at the end. We do not quote a firm figure down the phone for a job nobody has seen, and you should treat anybody who does with some suspicion, particularly on toughened and shaped work where the processing is most of the cost.

Experience, in the way that is actually useful to you

The expertise worth paying for in this trade is not that somebody can run a cutting wheel down a sheet. It is knowing that a particular obscure pattern will not toughen. That one brand of shower hinge wants a cut-out of exactly one shape and will not tolerate a near miss. That roller wave shows badly on a long dark splashback and barely at all on a shelf. That an old timber rebate measured at the glass line gives you a pane two millimetres too big once the putty is raked out. That a mirror fixed with ordinary building silicone will spot within a year, and that the spotting will be blamed on the mirror.

You get the benefit of that whether you are ordering one shelf or forty panes for a fit-out. Ring 020 4634 6045 between eight and five, Monday to Friday, with your sizes, the glass types and, most important, what the glass is going into. That last part is the one most people leave out, and it is the part that lets us be useful rather than merely accurate.