Picked up a stone chip in the windscreen of the Merc last week. Right slap bang in front of my eyeline on the driver's side.
There has been another one down low on the passenger side of the screen for more than a year but it hadn't spread thankfully.
Called the insurers and they were happy for Autoglass to fix them both. Because it's a company car and the company is VAT registered there was a small fee of just short of £10 to cover the tax but otherwise it was covered.
Very efficient guy came this afternoon to do the repair and the result is perfect. Interesting kit he was using. Some kind of suction thing creates a vacuum which sucks the repair resin into the damaged area.
Whole process was about half an hour and I really can't see any sign of the damage.
Top job and presumably a whole lot cheaper than a new screen.
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We may have to partake here...
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Had numerous repairs on the Kia Rio and 3 replacement windscreens in 80,000 miles of motoring.
I suspect the design of the car meant the angle of the windscreen was a magnet for stone chips.
The repair technique is quite interesting and very hard to spot where it had been repaired afterwards.
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>> We may have to partake here...
Ditto. The Berlingo picked up a nasty one on the M40/A34 last week. Mrs B was in car alone and tells of fairly large pebble kicked up by or falling from an aggregates truck bouncing of te windscreen
It does though demonstrate the strength of modern laminated screens. Toughened glass we had way back when would almost certainly have shattered.
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...Shattered into blunt-edged pieces, according to a Triplex leaflet I read once while waiting for the parental Renault to get new glass. Can anyone explain how that's even geometrically possible?
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>> Can anyone explain how that's even geometrically possible?
Don't know but it seems a reasonable description. I'd wager that, together with increased provision/use of seatbelts, the stuff achieved a step reduction in people suffering life changing facial injuries in motor accidents.
Once the screen had 'come in' to the car you NEVER stopped finding more bits of glass under seats/carpet/underlay etc.
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Toughened glass is processed by controlled thermal or chemical treatments to increase its strength compared with normal glass. Tempering, by design, creates balanced internal stresses which causes the glass sheet, when broken, to crumble into small granular chunks of similar size and shape instead of splintering into random, jagged shards. The granular chunks are less likely to cause injury. - wiki
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I picked up one too the other week - I was on my way to have the car MOT'd too!
I actually saw the projectile aiming straight for me and BANG! .. f*** it, thought I.
The Scoob passed the MOT with no advisories, but I'll keep an eye on the ding Justin Case.
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All you folk with windscreen damage must be serial tailgaters. :-)
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Once upon a time, long, long ago: I was driving home from sowf lunden to Hastings late at night when a large metal object fell orf the back of a flat-back truck I wasn't tailgating :)
It cracked my windscreen BIG time, so I hit the loud pedal, overtook said truck, which stopped on a quiet (A229) country lane in the middle of nowhere, man.
Two hairy-assed geezers jumped out and said woss on then, mate. Course, there was no way I could prove the offending article had been launched from their vehicle, I couldn't find it on the road. Stupid of me TBH.
8-)
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Toughened glass was a pain, but in fairness someone invented it before anyone thought of seatbelts, and heads were more likely to hit windscreens.
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>> Called the insurers and they were happy for Autoglass to fix them both.
>> Because it's a company car and the company is VAT registered there was
>> a small fee of just short of £10 to cover the tax but otherwise it was covered.
And as I found out to my cost afterwards it counts as a no-fault claim with most insurance companies, which means you'll pay for it anyway over the next six years.
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>> And as I found out to my cost afterwards it counts as a no-fault claim
>> with most insurance companies,
Most?
It's never affected my insurance premium, or anyone else's that I know of (apart from you).
Unless things have changed, the repair is guaranteed for as long as you own the vehicle. I really should have taken Autoglass up on that as Kevin's "special" resin discoloured after 3 or 4 years, making the repair stand out like a pimple on someone's forehead. To be honest though, it didn't really bother me as it was on the passenger side of the car and the tax disc hid it.
Last edited by: VxFan on Thu 5 May 16 at 10:26
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Shown on my renewal with Admiral and didn't gain NCD for that year. It's technically a claim, of course...
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>> Because it's
>> a company car and the company is VAT registered there was a small fee of
>> just short of £10 to cover the tax but otherwise it was covered.
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>>
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The £10 fee is standard. I've had a couple of them repaired.
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Oh ok, I must have misunderstood, I'm fairly sure they told me that there would be no charge unless the owner of the vehicle was VAT registered.
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>> The £10 fee is standard.
Wot he said.
A few years ago there was a bloke parked up at the edge of a supermarket car park offering "free" windscreen repairs. When I pulled up and asked him whether the chip in my windscreen could be repaired, he asked who I was insured with. "Tesco's" I replied. "Sorry mate, can't do it for free, it'll cost £20" was his answer.
Basically his "free" service consisted of it would only be free if your insurer didn't charge to repair windscreens. Other than that he would apply an admin charge on top of what their charge was.
Bye mate. Not paying you £20 when my insurer will get Autoglass to do it for £10.
The daft thing was people were actually paying his admin fee. Silly fools.
I later found out that these fly by night boys at supermarkets offering windscreen repair services use an inferior repair kit. Mind you, saying that, like I said earlier, Autoscreen's repair on my windscreen discoloured after approx. 3 or 4 years.
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Screen repair, top job - R.P.
