Cutting ultra-thick glass is a brutal process. If you’ve ever done it, you know the feeling—the cutting wheel is fighting the glass every millimeter of the way. When that glass is cold and stiff, the wheel just takes a beating. It chips. It wears down. Eventually, it just burns out. We found a way around this using infrared (IR) heaters that hit the cutting path right where it counts. Here is the trick: most heaters just warm up the surface, which doesn’t do much for a thick slab. We use shortwave IR because it actually sinks deep into the glass instead of just bouncing off. It creates this little zone of “softness” right along the score line. Basically, we’re making the glass give in a bit more easily exactly where the wheel hits. It’s much less of a fight. To make this work, we use high-power halogen or quartz lamps. They react in milliseconds. The goal isn’t to bake the whole slab—that would just cause the glass to crack from thermal shock—but to shoot a tight, focused beam of energy on a tiny strip of glass as the head moves. The difference in tool wear is huge. Because the glass is pre-softened, the wheel isn’t grinding against a cold, brittle wall. The mechanical load drops, and your blades simply last longer. It’s a relief not to be swapping out wheels every few runs. One thing to keep in mind: you’ll need to play with your feed rate. If you fly through it too fast, the IR doesn’t have time to soak in. Go too slow, and you’ll overheat the glass, which leads to those annoying, irregular breaks. You just have to dial in your PID controller so the heat stays consistent with the speed of the head. Once you hit that sweet spot, it’s smooth sailing.