It maybe me, or just wrong place, wrong time, but does anyone else think that modern windscreens seem to get chipped more than before?
I don't mean necessarily that more stones etc are being thrown up, but simply that it seems to take less impact to chip.
E.g. I was doing about 40mph, as was an on-coming vehicle and the little chipping that hit the windscreen on my 2002 VAG group car with Pilkington glass, sure enough took a bit of glass out.
Prior to this, a similar situation occurred and I had that one "filled". It could also be a coincidence but after the first chip repair, a few weeks later, a 12 inch crack appeared kind of in-line to it.
I guess the point I'm making is that perhaps the outer layers are not as thick/strong as before.
Just a thought.
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Any idea what the mystery stuff is that is used to 'repair' windscreen chips? Is it merely a dob of good old superglue - in which case, I could repair a chip myself in seconds!
Modern windscreens are bigger than they used to be - therefore more chance of getting hit???
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Waino and RB
DO NOT use a dob of superglue to "fix" your screen, It won't. and will stop it from being repaired correctly in the future.
RB you have just been unlucky, we reapir around 300.000 screens per year and no particular make or model stands out from the crowd in the anount of repairs required.
The repair process is to inject a resin into the void created by the impact. The crack that appeared a few weeks later would sugest that one of the small cracks in the chip had a small amount of air trapped during the reapir process, which at a later date has expanded and caused a crack to appear.
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inject a resin into the void
>
= Araldite dispenser?
I think old screens used to suffer more from total failure.
There were the laminated ones that came apart in sheets, held together by a kind of clingfilm, the kind that shattered into a thousand pieces at the slightest impact, and then of course the really old ones (flat)that were really only thick domestic window glass.
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No!!!!
Araldite will have the same affect as superglue. Neither have the correct properties i.e. the correct viscosity to allow the resin to flow through the chip to fill all voids, the correct optical qualities ( can you see through araldite ? ).
The system we use ( all use basicly the same principle ) injects the resin using the forces of a vaccum pump, the vaccum removes the air trapped in the chip and relaces it with the resin which is cured using ultra violet light, then polished smooth to give a nice flat and opticaly correct finish.
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Sorry I forgot to answer your questions aroung the different types of glass.
1) Toughened. Very hard to break ( apart from the edge ) but when it breaks has total failure.
2) Laminated. Easier to break as it is made up of 2 sheets of annealed glass ( normal house glass ) laminated together.But when it is damaged it stays in 1 piece, this is why it is used in modern cars where they are bonded into place to form the cars rigidity.
hope this helps
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Thanks chaps.
I was glad not to have yet replaced the screen due to the large crack. At least it's on the passenger's side and not in line of vision - yet.
RB
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