Repairs

Or - What Happens If It Breaks?

Glass is tough. My clumsiness means that glass beads and other objects get dropped on a concrete floor more often than I’d like – and 99.9% of the time they’re fine.

We know that life happens. Accidents happen. Glass can be remelted and mended. Glass is seen as a throwaway material so repairs aren’t usually considered, but they’re often both possible and practical.

We offer free glass repairs, so the only cost to you is postage.

But First - How Not To Break Glass Things

Avoiding hard knocks against a hard surface is the key to keeping glass safe. Think of it in the same way as you’d treat a wine glass – you don’t consider that it’s risky to place it on a table but you wouldn’t throw it across the room into the sink.

Glass jewellery is a lot sturdier than your average wine glass – it’s thicker and stronger.

Our glass jewellery is designed so that beads and links aren’t fixed. That helps keep them safe by allowing them to move out of the way. Much of our glass uses borosilicate glass which stands up well to impact – it’s the same stuff that the Pyrex you find in your kitchen is made from.

Beads of Courage - Glass is Tough

What if I told you that glass beads are so safe they’re given to seriously ill children? There’s a fantastic program called Beads Of Courage for kids going through treatment for cancer, cardiac issues and more. The volume of beads needed means that some are made commercially – but the really special ones are made by lampworkers like me. Beads aren't toys and should never be given to small children who might swallow them.

Repairs

We use three types of glass – soft glass, borosilicate glass and recycled bottle glass. The description will tell you which glass we’ve used for what.

Soft glass is used for beads and some plant decorations. It’s the trickiest to repair because it’s most likely to crack when reintroduced to the flame to be remelted. So glass beads and decorations made from soft glass can’t always be repaired – we might ask for a photo so we can see the damage. All of our soft glass carries a 6 month guarantee – if it breaks and we can’t fix it we’ll replace it.

Borosilicate glass is used for links, chains and most decorations. It is much easier to mend. It can be remelted so that breaks flow back together, becoming one piece again. If you’ve bought borosilicate glass from us and it breaks we’ll mend it for as long as we’re lampworking (I’m planning on another 30 or so years)

Bottle glass is used in beads, and again we can repair these for you for as long as we’re lampworking.

How Do I Arrange A Repair?

Send an email to hello@joymcmillanglass.co.uk telling us what needs to be repaired and what happened.

Let us know if you’ve got all the bits.

If you can send a photo showing the damage that’s always useful.

Why do we want to know how the damage happened? It’s about quality control. If something breaks after your cat pushed it off the kitchen workshop onto stone tiles we’ll still fix it for free, but we won’t spend a lot of time worrying that it shouldn’t have broken. If something breaks for no obvious reason that tells us we need to have a look at why this happened.

We’ll give you instructions for sending the bits back to us and let you know when we expect the repair to be completed.

Do we limit repairs?

We’re confident in the quality of our work and the loveliness of our customers. We’ve yet to have work come back for repair. So there isn’t a set limit to the number of times something could come back to us. If we ended up repairing something multiple times because it was being badly treated we might rethink that – but as that’s never happened that’s one for down the road.

If something is absolutely destroyed and can’t be repaired we’ll say so and look at turning the glass into something else for you.