1985-1998 [Subscribe to Daily Digest] |
Hello everyone,
Just thought i'd share my experience with everyone on my last windsheild replacement...
When i bought my 1988 carlson, it has a small crack along the bottom edge of the glass. Not a big deal, but big enough to prevent the car from passing NY state inspection (legally anyways ;) ) It was purchased from vermont, where they aren't so tight with their state inspecions i believe...
it was sort of leaky as well, and i figured I should get it fixed anyways tho.
So i called "triumph auto glass" and they quoted me at $180 with a standard warranty I believe, and they would bring the windsheild right to my driveway and replace it for me!
Sounded like a good idea at the time, so why not.
The guy shows up, takes my windsheild out, and tells me that there has been several repairs on it before, and none of them were done very "professionally" he said. One thing he was very surprised about is the material they used in the prior jobs, some sort of "gummy tape"... which is the black sticky crud that gets EVERYWHERE and needs some sort of paint thinner like chemical to remove.
LUCKILY for me, at the time, I had my entire dashboard apart, and I was doing some repairs, as you can probably tell from the picture...
...but if i didn't have my dash apart, this gummy stuff and debris would have been EVERYWHERE... and been a real PIA to clean up.
After he get's the gummy stuff off the car, we realize the extent of the RUST DAMAGE to the area where the windhield will sit.
Because of poor job in the past, and a bad seal around the old windshield, water had been trapped in the area around the metal of the car for so long, it had rusted out huge sections of the contact area, and even right through in a few places.
The repair man said, he wouldn't be able to even go on fixing it, and he wanted me to get a shop to somehow fix the rust!!!
So i was like, "let me get this straight, you're going to take OUT my windshield that was perfectly fine to drive with, and leave me with NO windshield, and you want me to somehow get it to a shop for repairs??!?"
Let me tell you, i got on the phone with his manager in the home office pretty quick, and we worked out a deal...
...his guy would put in the windshield they brought me, but with NO warranty, and no gurantees. I accepted their offer, as i really had no choice.
the repair man said that the extent of the rust was some of the worst he'd ever seen, and it was pretty much due to the careless work of the people before him that had worked on it. He said there were several different types of material residue present so he believed it had been replaces more than one time before, 2 or 3 times!
Luckily for me, this repair man had a big heart, and he coudl obviously see that with the car all torn apart, that i was working on it very hard, and it meant a lot to me...
so... He did his absolute best to get the new glass in so that it could last as long as it can.
He said, with uneven surfaces for the glass to sit on, and especially holes in the metal... the glass will start to stress fracture at those areas, and it'd only be a matter of time before the cracks at the edges spread inwards again, because the glass is under so much pressure.
He used some sort of black liquid sealant over all the rust areas, and painted this stuf on really thick for me... to supposedly neutralize the rust and keep it from speading...
when that dried, then he got these tubes of superheated sealant, that had been in a small oven warming up in his van.
He used 2 or three times as much as he said he normally uses, in order to try and get the glass to have a smoother, better base to stick to, and to give some extra security to hold off the glass from cracking as long as possible.
When the job was done, it looked great tho. The new rubber weather seal, that was already attached to the windshield when it showed up, was much larger than the old seal, and almost covered up my A-pillars from the edge of the windshield to the edge of the front doors.
It's been about 6 months, and there are no visible cracks yet.
Just a story to people who have to deal with replacing glass in an older car...
hopefully you dont get a real hard-line repairman who insists on you getting the rust fixed at a shop. that would have totally sucked...
But for under $200, I am happy with the results!
See links to other pictures below...
http://www.geocities.com/griffin800/windshield.jpg
http://www.geocities.com/griffin800/windshield2.jpg
http://www.geocities.com/griffin800/windshield3.jpg
posted by 74.70.10...
, Mon, 19 Mar 2007 15:34:06, Wed, 21 Mar 2007 17:49:25
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