Sometimes you just know it won't have a happy ending. So it came as no surprise when this 12 inch glass suspension shattered. I was contacted by a fella who does these SteamPunk things. I have too many of these for the collector market and thought I'd experiment and see just what might be done with them. He uses the pin type insulators for many of his works, he drills them, he cuts them - not too many problems. He bought one suspension from me and tried to drill it for an electrical cord to pass through. Didn't work. I thought I'd have a try and see if I could just cut the top off one to make a flat surface. Did that no problem. Then I tried to cut through the whole thing, cap, cement, glass and pin. I thought if that would work, then the pin could just be knocked out leaving a nice hole for whatever he wanted to put through. No problem until I cut deep enough to get through the glass and released the built in stress. I believed that there was a slight chance that with the glass being firmly sandwiched between two layers of concrete, that cutting through it successfully was at least a distant, albeit very distant possibility.