Glass · Production
Cutting labels: one per pane, straight from the nest
Every shop labels its glass, and almost every shop does it with a marker pen while the panes are still on the table. It is ten or twenty minutes of copying numbers off a plan, and it is where the wrong size ends up on the wrong van. These come out of the nest the optimiser already solved, in the order the table cuts them, with the same piece codes as the plan.
This is what comes out
One label per pane, in the order the table cuts them. The code matches the cutting plan, so a label on a trolley and a rectangle on the diagram always mean the same pane.
R means the pane was rotated in the nest — which matters the moment the glass is coated, laminated or patterned and its two faces are not interchangeable.
Nothing to label yet
Labels are made from a solved nest, so there has to be one first. Put your cutting list into the optimiser and come back — or open a job somebody sent you as a link.
Nest a cutting list →What goes on the label, and why
The label exists for the moment nobody plans for: the panes are off the table, on a trolley, and the person moving them is not the person who cut them. At that point two panes 40 mm apart in size are the same pane, and the only way to tell them apart is to measure — which costs more than labelling ever did.
The piece code
A letter for the size and a number for which one it is, so B7 is the seventh pane of size B. It is the same code printed on the cutting plan diagram, which means a label and a rectangle on a drawing always mean the same pane. The letters I and O are skipped: on a workshop floor, under dust, they read as 1 and 0.
Rotated
If the nest turned a pane to make it fit, the label says so. On clear float it changes nothing. On coated, laminated, patterned or toughened-with-a-distortion-direction glass it changes which face goes outward, and finding out at the installation is expensive. It is printed as a mark rather than a word so it survives being read quickly.
Which sheet it came from
Useful twice. It groups panes that were cut together, which is usually how they are stacked; and if a pane breaks, it says which sheet to go back to, and whether there is enough left on it to recut without opening a new one.
Printing them
The large and medium layouts are plain A4 with a dashed line to cut along — no special paper, two columns of 95 mm inside a 10 mm margin so an ordinary printer can reach the edges.
The small layout is 70 × 37 mm, three across and eight down: the 24-per-sheet adhesive label sold across Europe. That format has no gaps and no margins — three columns of 70 mm are exactly the 210 mm width of the paper — so the page is set to print with no margin at all and the dashed cut lines are dropped, because there is nothing to cut and the line would show on the edge of every label.
Print at 100%, with scaling turned off. A printer set to "fit to page" shrinks everything by a few per cent, which is invisible on the first label and half a label out by the bottom of the sheet. That single setting is the usual reason label printing "does not work".
Questions people ask
- What should be written on a glass cutting label?
- Enough for somebody who did not cut the pane to route it without asking: a code that matches the cutting plan, the finished size, what the glass is, which sheet it came off, and whether it was rotated in the nest. Rotation matters on coated, laminated and patterned glass, where the two faces are not interchangeable.
- Why label glass at all if the sizes are on the plan?
- Because the plan stays at the cutting table and the glass does not. Once panes are on a trolley, two similar sizes are indistinguishable at a glance and measuring each one to sort them costs more time than labelling them did. Labels also survive the job being interrupted, which a cutter's memory does not.
- Can you print glass labels on ordinary paper?
- Yes. The large and medium layouts are laid out for plain A4 with a dashed cut line, and the small layout matches the common 70 by 37 mm three-across label sheet, so it also works on adhesive stock. Nothing here needs a label printer.
- What does the piece code on the label mean?
- A letter for the size and a number for which one it is: B7 is the seventh pane of size B. The same code is on the cutting plan diagram, so a label and a position on a sheet always refer to the same pane. The letters I and O are skipped because they read as 1 and 0 on a workshop floor.