How do you repair glass figurines?

Answer 1

A crystal figurine, that could mean lot's of things. Some figurines are made of glass that has been fused while extremely hot. Usually these are rather large and flowing peices, sea gulls, animals and sometimes even flowers. Since they are essentially blobs of heated glass sometimes the smaller pieces simply part company with the larger peices. They are not actually broken they just come apart. These can be cleaned and reset with little or no damage showing. Perhaps your figurine is made up of faceted glass, made up to represent almost any thing. Usually they have simply come apart, the adhesive was not properly applied in the begining, cleaning and resetting works here too. Often when these items become damaged some amount of grinding and polishing is necessary to remove the sharp edges and make the piece presentable again. We once had a small hand that originally stood with fingers up on a table. Its only use was to look pretty. Someone knocked it over and damaged three of the four fingers. No way to repair them or replace them, what to do? We simply cut off all the fingers the same length, polished the ends till they were back to clean and adheared the hand (fingers down) to a small round mirror. Now the hand appears to be reaching into the mirror.

Answer 2

if the glass is transparent, you can use an ultraviolet curing glue to repair the break. You clean the area, apply a small dab and then take it out into direct sunlight to "cure" and set in just moments. Opaque glass is harder to repair, since the UV light must penetrate the glass to cure the UV glue. 3M makes one, there are others. The non-commercial glue site "this to that .com" rates glues and can tell you which is best. Unless your glass figure is made of borosilicate glass (aka Pyrex) there is no sense trying to fix it in a flame. Borosilicate figures, however, can be repaired successfully by the artist.