Beetle Bits

Today a wonderful thing came in the mail - my Beetle Bits system! 

"Your what?"

Ha! I have no idea how it got its name, but it's basically a system for cutting strips and angles, with a great degree of precision. Once it's set up it looks like this:

The clear "shuttle" on the bar actually holds a cutter, called the Flying Beetle. After lining up the glass...

You can make a nice straight score just by sliding the cutter up the bar. 

Easy. I scored a little deeper than I'd score with a hand cutter, the adjustment for the cutting head is still very finicky to me. 

The great part about this is you can keep sliding down the glass at whatever interval you want and just go to town scoring.

Easy.

One thing I love about this system is that it comes with these clear grids. As you can see in the picture, lots of little glass shards come off with each break in the glass. The squares in the grids catch all the little buggers so I don't have to sweep off my table with each break.

If you were smart, you'd flip over the glass while the score lines were still in tact, turn the glass over, and score on the other side, perpendicular to the original lines. Then you can break each row, then each square.  In this case, I got so excited about taking the pictures that I did it "the long way" but I don't really care. I love to score and break.

Scoring across a strip...

Breaking out the squares... 

So just playing around, I cut all these squares in about 45 minutes, and that is just learning how to use the system. 

It was easy to line up for triangles, too, although there are tools that come with it that I'd have used if I had a bunch to cut.

How cool is this? This is with no grinding or anything. They fit together beautifully - right on the money.

So what will I do with all those squares? I think it would make a really cool panel to hang over the top of a window, like a valance curtain would. We have a narrow window at the top of our stairs that gets beautiful light in the morning. For the meantime, I just put the squares in a box for a "someday" project. 

And with that, I leave you with a picture of what I hope to never need in my workshop, but I have on hand just in case!