Clear Vision
EAST BUTLER — Standard Bent Glass Corp. is known worldwide for monolithic, laminated, tempered and insulated glass products.
The company, founded in 1936, produces glass for office towers, storefronts and skylights, as well bullet-resistant materials for residential and security applications.
All bending, laminating and insulating is done in one facility to ensure quality through all phases of manufacturing and fabrication.
"What we basically do is buy large sheets of glass and add value to it by forming it with these soft molds," said Jeff Nichols, vice president of sales.
The process begins at the glass cutting line, where 96-by-130-foot sheets of flat, architectural-grade glass are pushed along a cushion of air and cut to the specifications of the client.
Scrap glass is recycled.
The glass then is bent or curved in one of the company's two types of furnaces, a gas-heated, clay-mold furnace or an electric-powered furnace.
"Some of the technology in the process goes back to 1914," Nichols said, referring to the two clay furnaces at the heart of Standard Bent Glass' main facility.The company has two buildings on Lincoln Avenue, which combined have about 180,000 square feet of space."Whereas that glass (in the clay furnaces) simply slumps into the clay molds, this glass (in the electric furnaces) oscillates back and forth and is bent," Nichols said.The electric furnaces were introduced in the 1980s to mold tempered glass through an automated process."It ends up like an M&M, hard on the exterior and softer on the inside. So it is difficult to break, but if it is broken, it shatters into very small pieces," Nichols said.Glass must be heated to 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit before it is soft enough to form.The tempered glass, used for car windows, zoo displays and custom architecture such as airport terminals, is rapidly cooled by a machine called an air quench.From the furnaces, glass moves to an autoclave for lamination. The company bought the device and began producing laminated glass in 1983."It's basically a giant pressure cooker," Nichols said.
The semi-trailer-sized autoclave is one of the largest used for architectural manufacturing in the United States, according to Nichols. It combines multiple sheets of glass with vinyl layers using a mix of heat and pressure in a vacuum.The vinyl sheets, known as polyvinyl butyryl, or PVB, are opaque in their dry form, but become clear once melted between panes of glass."We can do 1,000 different colors by combining different colored vinyls. It's all driven by design," Nichols said.Standard Bent Glass has produced several different types of laminated glass. Custom textures, patterns and digital images can be added between panes to meet a customer's needs.One New York City office building, for example, has the silhouette of palm trees inside its lobby glass."It's called Standard Bent Glass, but nothing here is standard. Everything is custom. It's all value-added, high-end product," Nichols said.In addition to its aesthetic and safety perks, bent laminated glass also is useful in sound reduction and blocking ultraviolet rays.Finished glass is at last moved to the vertical polishing line, where the edges are smoothed and holes are drilled, if necessary.Then, it's ready to ship to the customer. Lance Cotton, vice president of operations, said a form is made from urethane foam to keep the glass from moving during shipping."We design our own crating," Cotton said. The product is shipped across North America on trucks.Standard Bent Glass' second facility on Lincoln Avenue produces bullet resistant materials using the same processes. One of its key clients is the U.S. military, for which it produces reinforced glass for Humvees.The facility also produces bullet, attack and blast-resistant glass for prisons, police stations, banks, and the U.S. Department of State.
"We do U.S. embassies around the world. Most of what we do now is actually centered around security glazing. (Sept. 11) was huge to our business," Nichols said."Our primary market is North America, but we ship around the world," Nichols said.Standard's curved and bent glass is used for elevator enclosures, revolving doors and commercial railings worldwide.When the Standard Bent Glass Co. opened in 1936, founder A.H. "Arch" Schottland had spent more than two decades perfecting the clay soft-mold process to produce high-quality bent glass."For 50 years, it was just curved glass," Nichols said.When Schottland died in 1982, he left the company to his second wife, who sold it to Butler natives Mike and Kent Hartley in 1992.The Hartleys immediately began to expand the business into the growing field of attack-resistant glass."When I started, we were just doing curved glass. Now it's primarily bullet-resistant technologies," said Nichols, who has been with Standard Bent for 21 years.In 2000, Standard Bent Glass bought Global Security Glazing in Selma, Ala. Standard Bent employs another 130 employees at that 150,000 square foot facility, which produces exclusively noise and attack-resistant glass.The companies' products have been used at the Dallas World Aquarium in Texas, the Botanical Gardens in Buffalo, N.Y., and Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami, Fla.Most recently, the companies combined efforts with Figg Bridges to create the 200-foot tall central pylon of a bridge in Toledo, Ohio.The steel and glass structure contains digital lighting equipment and can produce dazzling images along its height.
