Hi-

Slabs (called "dalles") of glass are available from Kokomo in Indiana and from Blenko in West Virginia. There is another company in France which makes dalles, too, near Lyon. The comments which others have written about the high cost (both the equipment to melt and pour glass slabs and the energy to make runs) and the tricky physics involved with glass (annealing times and stresses bound in mixtures of glasses with different properties) are all true. I do have the name of a company in the Great Lakes region which sells equipment to set up a shop and make your own dalles, but it will be around $270,000.00 to tool up a site, before adding in energy costs to actually run the furnace.

The dalles measure approximately 8' wide by 12' long by 1' thick, weigh around seven to nine pounds each, depending on the color, and cost around $12 each before shipping (depending on color). The colors range from clear to very dark hues of indigo. Be aware that the darker the color of the glass the hotter it will be; in bright sun a clear dalle can be almost cool to the touch whereas a dark blue dalle next to it will nearly burn your hand.

www.kog.com/Hot/Dalles.html

www.blenkoglass.com/blenkoco...verre.htm

Blenko is also making the hollow architectural glass blocks in various colors.

These dalles are used for making dalle de verre stained glass windows, as in the National Cathedral in D.C. and in St. Mary's in SF.

I am sure I have seen glass from slabs which are much thicker and more crude, with bubbles and layers of different densities, which may (in fact, probably) are produced by recycling bottles and suchlike. Sometimes big chunks of this stuff are available at garden centers, pet stores, and interior decorating places as color accents for aquariums (instead of big rocks) and gardens or suchlike. No idea where that stuff comes from, but it looks as if the slab would have been about a foot thick before someone took a sledge hammer and broke it up into artsy chunks.

Best,
AlaskaSteven