Making a Menger sponge in stained glass

I'll agree that "a near impossibility" feels like a real big overstatement; curves are very doable and common in hand-cut glass. That's true even in my first piece, under discussion, which is chock full of curves. I talk a bit in the process diary about getting comfortable with doing curved breaks after being over-cautious with my first few bits of glass.

That said, I can see how a CNC approach could help with the speed of the process; shallow/simple curves are easy enough to do reliably, but deeper, more complex, and significantly concave curves require additional effort and planning, potentially a lot of manual work with grozing pilers to break out a concavity, and additional grinding to finish out the shape.

So being able to turn a machine process to some of those cuts would save a lot of manual effort and potentially get you right up to the final polish-grind stage in one go, which certainly sounds attractive for some kinds of design.

What you're missing is glass grinders (router) and band saws. Grinders use diamond abrasive bits and flood cooling. Glass bandsaws same deal. With those you can shape flat pieces any shape you want.

I was surprised and please how much I took to it, honestly; I went in cold and was prepared to not really get a knack for it.

But easy-looking is also a product of writing it up after the fact, and learning under good instruction; it was still a solid 20+ hours of work with a fair amount of cursing and bits of messing up and redoing stuff.

In any case, whether or not I caught on quicker than average, the process itself feels very accessible to me. I can recommend giving it a shot a lot more readily than I'd have guessed before I tried it myself.

Totally feasible! You could probably put a whole one-person workspace into about fifty square feet without getting cramped, less with some squeezing and multitasking, and I'd guess basic toolset would run you less than $500 retail.

The grinder I used is a pretty simple unit with a water reservoir tray under the grill that keeps the bit wet via a sponge feeder; probably about $100 new, used bargains if you go looking, but, yeah, water feed of some sort is key to the grinding working well on glass.

I got to use the studio's supply, so I haven't had to really sort out glass buying myself. And yeah, I was lucky to benefit from access to a really great collection of glass. But there are some commercial firms (Spectrum does very flat, transparent glass; Delphi does stuff with more character) and you can go haunt estate sales, watch for hobbyists getting out from under their supply, check with art schools, etc.

That is pretty neat, it's essentially a macroscale version of a CMOS process.