Johnny Rocket
VIP Member
With the (4mm thick) glass having only around 5 mm of engagement depth in the rear hinge channel section, and the front-to-back lid dimension being (from recollection) about 300mm, when you open your hob cover you are multiplying the lifting force at the catch so as to generate an edge force at the opening in the ‘jaw’ of the hinge C-channel which is (300/5=) 60 times that lifting force.
This correspondingly stresses the glass along the entire rear edge.
The tighter is the hinge the correspondingly greater are both the lift force and rear edge force.
When I broke my glass (my own stupid fault - I mistakenly turned the burner to idle, not off, and then shut the lid :-| ), I contemplated making a stainless steel replacement which would have been bulletproof.
I also considered hard-anodised aluminium, but it would nevertheless still scratch and look tatty quickly.
And, however, I really preferred to keep the original look and match to the lids each side, and for the replacement panel NOT to block out the light through the window when lifted (obviously also an issue with the stick-on surface protectors), so I had a piece of identical frosted glass custom cut to my template and toughened. £45 all-in.
Almost as difficult a job as preparing the new glass and restoring the existing channel sections was identifying a suitable adhesive. After a couple of false starts I spoke to Permabond Technical and used a 2-part grey epoxy with activator, and built myself a temporary jig with which to ‘pot’ the glass back into the cleaned-out front and rear castings such that everything was perfectly square, in line, matching the existing gaps and maintaining a continuous front edge curve (the epoxy kit was another £50!).
If you want better support of the glass then really you’ll need to make yourself a complete structural perimeter frame so that the glass (or whatever material) panel is substantially non-structural, and so is relieved of the 60x lifting load multiplier.
That’s a reasonable undertaking unless you have your own or a tame fab shop, and I don’t think it’s necessary either so long as the rear channel detail, glue gap and bonding are done properly.
I hope some of that might be useful - please shout if not!
Thanks.
This correspondingly stresses the glass along the entire rear edge.
The tighter is the hinge the correspondingly greater are both the lift force and rear edge force.
When I broke my glass (my own stupid fault - I mistakenly turned the burner to idle, not off, and then shut the lid :-| ), I contemplated making a stainless steel replacement which would have been bulletproof.
I also considered hard-anodised aluminium, but it would nevertheless still scratch and look tatty quickly.
And, however, I really preferred to keep the original look and match to the lids each side, and for the replacement panel NOT to block out the light through the window when lifted (obviously also an issue with the stick-on surface protectors), so I had a piece of identical frosted glass custom cut to my template and toughened. £45 all-in.
Almost as difficult a job as preparing the new glass and restoring the existing channel sections was identifying a suitable adhesive. After a couple of false starts I spoke to Permabond Technical and used a 2-part grey epoxy with activator, and built myself a temporary jig with which to ‘pot’ the glass back into the cleaned-out front and rear castings such that everything was perfectly square, in line, matching the existing gaps and maintaining a continuous front edge curve (the epoxy kit was another £50!).
If you want better support of the glass then really you’ll need to make yourself a complete structural perimeter frame so that the glass (or whatever material) panel is substantially non-structural, and so is relieved of the 60x lifting load multiplier.
That’s a reasonable undertaking unless you have your own or a tame fab shop, and I don’t think it’s necessary either so long as the rear channel detail, glue gap and bonding are done properly.
I hope some of that might be useful - please shout if not!
Thanks.
