1903 VINTAGE TRAM WINDOW RESTORATION

I've been working on a 1903 Vintage Tram window restoration commission for Bury Transport Museum this week. One of the original windows had become broken over the years, so my job was to engrave a new piece of glass to fit the old window frame that would match up with the Art Nouveau style of engraving on the existing vintage windows.

The original glass was hand blown in two layers, one layer of red with another layer of clear glass underneath it. I engraved the design cutting through the red layer og glass to reveal the clear layer below it.

The two panels are seen below, the original window panel is at the top with my reproduction panel underneath. As you can see the new piece of 'flash' glass that I usedis not quite as dense in colour as the original but it was the darkest piece of glass that I could get hold of at the time. Red flash glass is the most expensive glass of this type due to the fact that gold is used to create this rich red colour.

This image below shows the beautiful colour of the red layer of glass and the rippled effect of the uneven hand blown surface.

I'm not sure if I will get another one of these engraving jobs to do again but if I do you can guarantee that three will come along at once.

HMS ROSS - SHIPS CREST

I was asked to engrave this ships crest on a tankard to commemorate a veterans 90th birthday. The Veteran had served on the ship to clear the coastline of mines ready for the D-Day landings on the 6th of June 1944 for the operation code named 'Dynamo'. HMS Ross made numerous trips and evecuated more than one thousand men of the British expeditionary force from Dunkirk.

HMS Ross was a hunt class minesweeper, built by a Scottish ship building company Lobnitz & Co located at Renfrew on the River Clyde. The ship was launched on he 12th of June 1919. She was originally called HMS Ramsey but for some reason she was renamed before the launch.

In 1941 Ross was attacked by a German bomber a few miles from Aberdeen and she narrowly escaped when a bomb passed through her bow without exploding, leaving its tail fin behind.

The ship was decommissioned in 1945 and was then sadly sold for scrap on 13 March 1947.