Tech Tip - Back To Basics

I shared this story with the Wise Crack subscribers a few years ago. With our windshield repair forum becoming a very popular place to find repair tips and tricks, I think it is more important than ever to focus on the fundamentals of your repair process.

I recently trained a technician that had years of experience, but wasn’t completely pleased with the quality of his repairs. He knew all the tricks in the book. He knew how to flex those pesky stars with their probe. He knew how to massage and apply heat and pressure from the inside the vehicle on difficult combos. He even knew how to drill and pop a mini bull’s-eye to fill a stubborn leg. What he didn’t know, was that the reason he had to do all of those tricks was because he didn’t set the bridge properly to begin with, which is the most important trick of all.

You can eliminate over 90% of the flexing, drilling, and manipulating of the break if you set the bridge and injector properly. Just make sure you create a good seal without excessive pressure applied to the break. Most technicians over tighten their injector, so make sure not to turn your injector more than ¾ of a turn once it touches the glass. The leveling screws will vary depending on the curvature of the glass, but a good starting point is one and a half turns. By over tightening your injector you will often close up a leg on a star break or compress the surface of a bullseye. Before you reach for your drill or probe to try to fix the problem, first make sure your injector isn’t too tight. Try to spin the injector. If there is a lot of resistance, it may be too tight. Just loosen the injector by spinning it about a quarter turn counter clockwise. You will be surprised at just how often this will solve your problem without having to flex the glass and risking further damage to the glass.

Do you ever have trouble with the dreaded black dots or crescents of air left in your repairs? You would swear that you had all the air out, but after you take your injector off and cure, the bubbles are back. The most common reason for this is again, too much head pressure. The break is flexed inward due to the pressure, so when the injector is removed it snaps back, ever so slightly, to its original state, creating small areas within the break that are not completely filled.

One big reason people tend to over tighten their injector is that they wait too long to change their end seal. A broken down end seal will often require much more head pressure to seal correctly, so to make sure it doesn’t leak, technicians just add more pressure. That will stop the leak, but your repairs may suffer. Don’t try to get 30 or 40 repairs per seal. It just isn’t worth the extra couple of cents per repair to fight with a sloppy end seal.

So, make sure you go back to the basics and create a solid foundation for your repairs. You may find that some of those breaks that used to give you lots of trouble aren’t so bad after all.

-Matt Larson