Furnace
From Sand to Sheet.
Cut to Your Spec.
Shipped This Week.
Factory-direct float glass, toughened panels, and laminated sheets. No merchant markup. CNC cut to millimetre. Next-day delivery across mainland UK.
Eight steps from the furnace to your site.
Most glass merchants can't tell you where their glass comes from. We can tell you the exact furnace temperature on the day yours was made. Scroll through the process — by the time you reach the quote form, you'll know exactly what you're buying.
Batch Mixing
Silica sand, soda ash, limestone, and dolomite are weighed to the gram and blended in our mixing tower. The batch ratio hasn't changed in thirty years — it's what gives our glass its clarity.
Cullet from our own cutting floor is recycled back into every melt, reducing energy consumption and improving the consistency of the finished sheet.
The Melt
The batch drops into a continuous tank furnace burning at 1,500°C. At that temperature, the raw minerals dissolve into a single molten mass — nothing remains of the individual ingredients.
Our furnace runs twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Stopping it would take six months to restart properly, so we keep the flame alive regardless of order volume.
The Float Bath
Molten glass flows from the furnace onto a bath of liquid tin at 1,100°C. Because glass is lighter than tin and both are liquid, the glass spreads perfectly flat under its own weight.
Width and thickness are controlled by the speed of the ribbon and edge rollers. This is where float glass gets its name — and its flawless parallel surfaces.
Annealing
The glass ribbon enters the annealing lehr at 600°C and cools slowly over 200 metres to room temperature. Rush this stage and internal stress builds up — the glass will crack without warning months later.
Our lehr is the longest on the site. The slow cooling is what makes our standard float suitable for cutting, drilling, and toughening downstream.
Cutting & Sizing
The continuous ribbon is scored and snapped into master sheets, then cut to your ordered dimensions on our CNC cutting tables. Tolerances are held to ±1mm across the full sheet.
We cut any size from 50 × 50mm up to the full jumbo sheet. Odd shapes, angled cuts, and multi-pane cut-lists are handled in the same production run.
Get a Cut-List Quote
Fill in your cut list and we'll price it against current stock within 2 working hours. No sales rep, no markup — just the factory price.
"We've been ordering cut glass from Furnace for eleven years. The tolerances are consistent and the drivers know how to handle a stillage. That's genuinely rare."
Quality Inspection
Every lite passes under our automated optical inspection line before it leaves the cutting area. Inclusions, seeds, scratches, and edge chips are flagged and rejected at this point — not on your site.
Toughened panels are additionally checked for bow and warp with a straight-edge gauge. Laminated sheets are inspected under polarised light for delamination.
Packing & Stillages
Cut lites are interleaved with paper and loaded onto timber A-frame stillages. Stillage dimensions are standardised to fit a curtain-sider trailer two rows deep, maximising load efficiency on your delivery.
Pallet weights are calculated per order and included on the despatch note. If you're unloading by hand, we'll split heavy orders across multiple stillages at no extra charge.
Dispatch
Orders confirmed before noon are loaded the same afternoon for next-day delivery across mainland UK. Bulk orders to Scotland and Wales run Tuesday and Friday.
Our drivers are trained in glass handling. Every delivery includes a condition report — sign it, check it, and call us immediately if anything isn't right.
Quality Standards & Certifications
The furnace is running. Your glass is ready to cut.
Quote turnaround in under 2 hours on working days. Confirm by noon for next-day dispatch.
Download Our Stock Sheet
Full product catalogue with standard sizes, thickness availability, and bulk pallet pricing. Formatted for cut-list software and estimating tools.