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Just to make it clear, you can't use laminated or tempered glass to make a mirror. The first wont hold it's figure and the latter will probably shatter at some point into many tiny little pieces. I've also been asked about using the glass from a tv screen, which is tempered glass too, so that's a no-no, but I've also been told they have a significant amount of lead in them. So that why you need plate glass.
Then you will find that thick plate glass is hard to get hold of these days as it's not made very thick anymore - if you need thick glass you get a laminated pane for safety reasons, so that's one reason why most people turn to pyrex type glass. If you contact Schott-Garsco in Sydney you will find they have ready made mirror blanks in various sizes and if you want to try a bigger mirror you can do what a friend of mine did and buy a sheet of thicker stuff, get it water-cut to the diameter you want (he got two from the sheet, sold the other blank to a another grinder).
When I tried to find portholes in Perth I just got laughed at, so eventually we (there was three of us searching for suitable material) we pieced together the glass situation story and ended up getting a shipment of blanks from Schott in Sydney. We kept going and also found that that sometimes you can get a scrap or offcut of the thicker plate glass - if you're lucky and you know the right people - but the glass companies didn't want to know you if you didn't have a size in mind. At one point I went halves getting a piece of plate water-cut into different size blanks and the result was not as good as I had hoped. They managed to loose a couple of blanks in their tank and the others were a bit rough around the edges.
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