Half a Job

[Glasseye]

More and more, I am coming across repairs where they have been only half done i.e. the repair has been capped with little or no resin absorption into the main damage area. No professional repairer would be happy with the finish. I have my suspicions who are the culprits but it is not doing the repair industry any favours and would tend to encourage the customer to go for replacement instead. It may be just a UK problem but I notice a service company in the US have just announced a record year for glass repairs I hope they have not sacrificed quality for quantity.

[t4k]

I see the same thing on a daily basis. I think the problem is coming from car washes on this side of the pond. I had a manager at one of my fleet accounts ask me to look at a repair his wife had done on her car at a car wash. It was one of the worst botched jobs I had ever seen. He told me these guys stand outside the exit of the car wash and dry windshields looking for chips. If they find one they call the insurance for you and make it very easy for the customer.

He called his wife and I asked her about the whole process and she said the guy put a device on her windshield in the parking lot with no UV protection and put a match on the inside of her windshield. He held the match until it burned his fingers, threw the match on the ground and removed his bridge. He let it cure while he did the paperwork, scraped it a bit and she drove off.

Does that sound like quality work or what?

[t4k]

More and more, I am coming across repairs where they have been only half done i.e. the repair has been capped with little or no resin absorption into the main damage area. No professional repairer would be happy with the finish. I have my suspicions who are the culprits but it is not doing the repair industry any favours and would tend to encourage the customer to go for replacement instead. It may be just a UK problem but I notice a service company in the US have just announced a record year for glass repairs I hope they have not sacrificed quality for quantity.

On your side of the pond, it's probably Screenman or some of his trainees. Just kidding Screenie!

[GlassStarz]

I find most of these come from the DIY kits sold at walmart etc

[screenman]

I find a lot in the UK come from the replacement guys, the car park guys, the untrained guys, the fly by nights. I know of only one training centre in the UK who trains drying out, and boy is this country wet, that training centre is Delta Kits UK.

I know of car park guys who have just a bridge and drill as a total kit.
I know of replacement companies who do not have a dryout system, or a UV shield.
I know of carpark guys who do not ever dry out because they say they do not have the time.
I know of fly by nights who say that the insurer will pay please sign this invoice Mr Customer, written on the back in small print is the fact that if the insurer does not pay withing 14 days then the customer is liable, 14 days later the customer gets the bill for £100 yep $150, he has signed to say he will pay, so often they do, scamming, these guys also carry very little tools.

I have said many times before the standard of repair in the UK is extremely poor, I put this down to totally inadequate training in a lot of cases, along with extremely poor desire to do the job properly by the majority of people attempting repairs.

[Glasseye]

My overall concern is that these poor standards have a totally negative effect on the repair industry. The end user ( customer) sees the repair they have received and if they have had it repaired via their insurance company they will sign for it as " job done" but they will tell their friends that it is not good and avoid having it repaired if it should happen to them. The knock on effect is that we all get "tarred with the same brush". It is really important that the Glass Repair Service is seen and recognised by future customers as a service that is completely separate from glass replacement. When I meet prospective customers I emphasise that I repair, I don't replace , my focus is on saving that glass, not replacing it.
As a service, there are 2 things that must be addressed, one, we need to start ramming this point home to large organisations who pay the final bill and get them thinking in the same way. They wouldn't recommend a body shop repair company who, by the way, do glass repairs as well, but they will do for a glass replacement company. The point being that their employees attitude is that " I fit windshields but we also repair so I will do it and if it doesn't work I replace it". The second one is standards, previous posts on this subject have mentioned several examples of poor standards. Customers need to be able to see that the Glass Repair Service is something that they can confidently use and know that the outcome will be what they expected, that is then Quality. At this moment in time the gap between what they expect and what they get can be a great disappointment.
So how do we go about achieving these two objectives? i.e. changing mindsets regarding Glass Repair and achieving a quality Glass Repair Service. I would like to open this to debate on this forum.

[screenman]

I have been trying for I was going to say 22 years, however it was only in about 1991/92 that we started to see poor quality work appearing.

[t4k]

I ran across another "half a job" today. I was able to better it but I was not able to make it look as good as I wanted.