Six Display Panels at Market Square, One Held In by Its Signage

Two display window bays at Market Square in Geelong needed replacing. Six panels in total, three to a bay.

Each bay is built the same way. A large centre panel facing the walkway, with a narrower panel on each side running back at an angle to meet the wall. It is a good looking way to build a shopfront and it gives a shop far more display frontage than a flat window would. It also means the three panels lean on each other geometrically, so you cannot simply pull one out and slide another in.

The glass in them was original float. On the first bay, the only thing holding a cracked panel in place was the signage vinyl stuck to the front of it.

Watch the removal first

The part of this with the most in it is getting a large cracked sheet of float glass out of a frame in one controlled go. Here is that, filmed and talked through, before we get into how the rest of the job ran.

Section one, getting the gear on site

Panels this size are not a two person carry. They are handled with a glass lifter, and the glass lifter has to get out of the truck first.

It comes off on certified unloading ramps and is driven down under its own power rather than lifted or dragged. Simple, controlled, and repeatable.

The site trolley for carrying the panels comes off next, lifted down by the Jekko itself. It is a certified crane as well as a glass manipulator, so it can unload the rest of our own equipment before it starts on the glass.

Section two, bay one

The first bay had a cracked centre panel. The crack ran from an impact point in the lower section and spread across the pane, and the coloured signage vinyl was the only thing keeping it in one piece.

That is float glass. Ordinary annealed glass, which breaks into large sharp pieces rather than crumbling. On a covered walkway with people going past all day, a cracked sheet of it held in by adhesive vinyl is not something to leave.

The bead that had been tiled in

Here is the part that adds time to jobs like this, and it is worth knowing about if you own or manage a building.

The bottom bead of the frame is an access bead. It is the removable strip that lets the glass come out and go back in. On this bay, whoever laid the paving had tiled and grouted hard up against it, locking it in place.

Nothing malicious. Tilers are not glaziers, and there is no reason a tiler would look at that strip and know it has to stay free. But it means the bead cannot be lifted, and the only way forward is to chisel the grout back off it before any glass can move.

It is slow, careful work, done by hand right beside finished paving that nobody wants damaged. If you are ever having paving or tiling done up to a shopfront, ask the tiler to hold back off the bottom bead. It costs nothing at the time and it saves an hour or more every time that glass is touched for the rest of the building's life.

The new panels going in

With the frame clear, the new glass went in on the Jekko. The lifter takes the weight, holds the panel square, and lets it be walked into the opening under control rather than muscled.

Because of the bay geometry the panels have to go in and be set in the right order, with the angled returns and the centre panel meeting cleanly at the corners. Get the sequence wrong and the last panel does not fit.

The white strip across the finished glass is temporary. New clear glass in a walkway is genuinely hard to see, so it gets marked until the shop puts its own signage back on.

Section three, bay two

Same construction, same problem. A cracked centre panel with signage vinyl doing the work the glass should have been doing.

Shopfront glass in a centre or an arcade

Work like this has constraints that a standalone shop does not. There are people walking past all day, other tenants either side, delivery windows to work around, and finished floor surfaces that have to survive the job.

The equipment is what makes it manageable. Being able to unload, carry and place panels of that size with a machine rather than a crew of people keeps the working area small, keeps the walkway open, and keeps the glass under control from the truck to the frame.

If you manage a centre, an arcade or a strip of tenancies and you have cracked glass sitting behind signage, send us a photo of the opening and the frame. That tells us the panel size, the frame type and how it comes apart, which is most of what we need to price it properly.

Floor to ceiling, with very little room for error

These are floor to ceiling panels. There is no frame margin to hide behind and nowhere for a panel to sit slightly out and go unnoticed. The glass either lands square in the opening or it does not go in at all.

That is why the whole job is built around controlled movement rather than strength. The lifter carries the weight so the panel can be walked in slowly, adjusted by millimetres and set without anybody wrestling it. On a bay window, where three panels have to meet each other at the corners, that control is the difference between a clean install and a very expensive noise.

If you want to see the same principle on a harder site, we did four 200 kg panels reverse glazed in Colac that other glaziers had knocked back.

Have you got a job coming up?

If you have glass that needs replacing and you already know it is going to be awkward, heavy, high or in a place people walk past all day, book us in early rather than late. We own the machines that make those jobs ordinary, so the lift is planned rather than improvised on the day.

The full fleet, with load charts and what each machine is actually for, is on our equipment hire page.