pressure ring

[Brent Deines]

It was not drilled to the laminate and the pit area is finished properly. In order to see the pressure ring at all we had to use a high def camera and some creative lighting that also highlights the pit area. Using the same method to take the photograph will show you things you cannot see with the naked eye even on the best of repairs.

[screenman]

If I see a pressure ring before curing I will leave the injector on negative pressure and only just touching the glass enough to seal, this will sometimes let some of the resin that can be contributing to the ring ease back out. This sometimes allows the ring to subside. If this does not work I will release the pressure and warm very slightly from the outside of the glass around the damage and allow to cure, this will also sometime remove the ring.

Pressure rings are often found when creating bulleye's in a practise glass, left for 24 hours to settle before repairing sometimes means they are gone. PVB has a memory, just sometimes like us oldies it is a bit slow in reacting.

[Dave M]

My first thought when I saw the before and after pics was, "damn that's a pretty good repair". Than two post complain about this and that which Brent replies and defends how the repair was drilled and finished properly. Am I safe to assume that the repair in these pics was done at Delta Kits by a Delta representative?

[Brent Deines]

The repair was performed by a Delta Kits rep but let me reiterate that it "was not drilled" and there was no air visible to the naked eye in the cured pit resin. Although the photo makes the finished pit look less than stellar, to the naked eye it looks great and the surface is perfectly smooth and polished. Any completed bullseye with a similar amount of glass missing from the impact point will look that way under the same lighting conditions when photographed with the camera we used. Stand back a couple of feet or photograph it with your average camera under normal lighting conditions and you would be hard pressed to find the repair.

We can go one step further with a digital microscope or higher quality camera, and show that there are not only tiny air bubbles in "every" completed repair, but that there are also air bubbles and other imperfections in the glass itself. We can also show just the opposite by changing the lighting, camera angle and camera resolution, making the same repair completely disappear. However, even when we are using before and after photographs for the purpose of selling Delta Kits products, we don't use the camera or lighting to make breaks disappear. All that would do is make customers unhappy when they are unable to achieve the perceived perfection.

The goal here was to show the pressure ring, which we were successful in doing, but this brings up something I have been meaning to address for quite some time. Although some on this forum frequently ask to see photographs, myself included, it's a bit foolish to assess the quality of the repair or the skill of the technician based solely on a photograph. A lot of windshield repair suppliers show before and after photos that are probably real, but photographed in such a way that all imperfections are invisible. This is a deceptive practice that puts unrealistic expectations in the heads of new windshield repair technicians.

By the same token, when a technician posts a photo on this forum they are trying to show the imperfections with as much clarity and detail as possible, but often get a lot of negative feedback when in some cases the repair quality is perfectly acceptable. This is unfortunate as it does not encourage technicians to share their photos.

Not everyone understands that any repair can be photographed to make it look like it was done be a rookie if that is the goal. To prove my point I invite any naysayers to send us a repair that is representative of their very best work. We'll photograph it and put it on the forum for everyone to critique.