You're really grinding my gears (pun intended)

Okay so I feel like the title might be misleading, there will be no gears unfortunately. But there will be grinding! With a grinder.. the machine.

Anywho, grinding is pretty straight forward as far as my knowledge goes; you use a machine with a spinning diamond bit to shave the glass down to be smooth. I also use it to fix the shapes of some of the pieces, especially the curves. In this step I'm just trying to get every piece to what it should look like. The next step would be to grind to fit everything nicely, but we'll cover that next time.

Now, the biggest hurdle I face when it comes to grinding is chipping. If you press too hard or the glass is weak it will chip. This isn't the end of the world, it's just annoying when I go to foil the pieces. I also find that I'm not sure how hard to press or how fast the glass should be shrinking, so I've chosen Youtube for this project; I feel like I can get a good sense of what to do with video visuals.

So here's the video I watched:

First of all, I chose this video because she has long nails like I usually do, and I ALWAYS grind them. So there's another learning opportunity.

Right off the bat, two minutes in, I'm learning some life-changing stuff. For example, I'm supposed to move the glass from one side to the other, against the drill rotation? I've just been pushing it against the bit and hoping for the best.

Next- there's different bits?? I've been blind to the possibilities.

And finally, turns out I'm just pressing too hard and that's why it's chipping.

I'm gonna show you guys a brief video of me grinding but I'm going to mute it, because the sound of glass grinding is almost worse than glass cutting.

So there we have it! I feel much more comfortable grinding glass now, and I'll see you next time to fit all the pieces together!