New windscreen for the Col'n'Suemobile

On New Year's Eve while we were driving down to my brother's house in Essex our windscreen (that's windshield for my north American readers 😊) was hit by a stone and chipped. I didn't get round to phoning the insurance company about it till yesterday and I was told that because of the size and location of the chip (bigger than a 5p piece and in the middle of the windscreen on the driver's side) it could not be repaired and the glass had to be replaced as soon as possible.

So this afternoon a nice man from Autoglass came and replaced the windscreen and the wipers too (it is recommended that you get new wipers when you replace the glass so I opted for that as they were going to need replacing soon anyway).

I figured that I might not be the only one who found the whole process interesting, having never seen a windscreen being replaced before (I'd seen one being repaired when the chip was smaller than this one), so here are some photos I took, with the rest of the story being told in the captions.

Many thanks to the nice man for doing a great job and for letting me take photos and write about the whole process.

Before - the little white mark you can see just above the steering wheel is NOT the chip -
it's about 8 inches to the right of that and is not visible in this picture

This is the best picture I could get of the chip - it was bigger than a penny and smaller than a 10p piece

The nice man's van - the thing on the top is a canopy that can be used if it's raining

The first stage is to put in seat protectors - presumably that's in case the glass shatters while it's being taken out 

This is what I am calling the 'glue-cutter' - I'm not sure what the proper name for it is. The string goes around the outside of the windscreen (I didn't see how he got it through from the inside to the outside) and then the nice man attached a handle to this apparatus and wound it in. The string cuts through the old glue as it is wound in

This is the string being pulled through the gap that the nice man must have made (but I didn't see it)

The 'glue-cutter' in action - the last bit was a bit tricky and took a bit of effort. After getting the glass off he told me that he could tell that it had been replaced at least once before (before we owned the car) - this may have been why he had some difficulty getting it off

This is what a car looks like with no windscreen 

After the glass was taken out, he used a sort of chisel to get all the old glue out and then he applied a layer of primer to the glass and one to the car (this photo) and then a layer of glue to the glass (which is basically the thick rubber seal you can see on any car) 

The new glass waiting to be installed (but before the glue was applied)

The last stage - this is the new glass being held in placed by two sort of sucker things - again I don't know what the correct name is so 'sucker things' will have to do.