Windshield Repair Forum

Recently I've read post where some think natural UV is OK to cure resins without the use of a lamp. I personally have a problem with this! I use a curing lamp on every repair regardless of conditions. It could be 90 degrees and sunny but I'll still use my lamp with every repair. Why? Simply because a quality UV lamp cures resin better and faster than natural UV. If you don't agree with this, simply ask Delta as to how their resins cure best. Natural UV or lamp cured! I think you'll find these results surprising!

Today I had a customer with 3 chips. One was small so I decided to let the sun cure the resin and use my UV lamp to cure the other larger chips. After completing all 3 chips I went to scrape the pit resin from the small chip and found that it was still wet. It was a sunny day, too. No more sun curring for me.

Dale...

We rarely use a curing lamp. The reason? That valuable resource time. After our repairs are completely filled, we fill the pit area with a thicker viscosity resin, (which definitely cures faster)then apply the curing sheet. The repair cures in about 1 min or less. Or we leave the curing sheet on & move to the next vehicle, apply our bridge then return to "backscrape" the repair, polish the pit & voila. We are done.

The reason we advocate curing with a UV lamp is because it's a known value. You know that using our lights, in 3-5 minutes, you've got a full cure. Doesn't matter if you live in Texas, Oregon, or Alaska.

Can the sun completely cure a repair? Absolutely.

Do you know how long that might take? No. In fact, the time it takes to cure with the sun varies day to day, place to place.

So, if you want to cure with the sun, the only thing I recommend is to overestimate your cure times, so you get a full cure. Remember, surface cures are EASY, and don't take long. It takes much longer to cure the full chip.

Thanks Jeff for offering that info!

Important thing to remember everybody.....is that the cap always cures much faster than the the resin filled hit. Jeff already stated in a previous post that the outer layer of shield blocks 50% of the UV. So what does that mean? It means without the direct use of a proper UV lamp to cure ......it may take hours or possibly days to cure under natural sunlite. A good UV lamp is 20-40 times more effective than natural UV with resin, so why not utilize it?

StarQuest,

Great post! I thought that everone knew about curing with a quality UV light was much better than using sunlight.

I would guess that if you ask any w/s repair manufacturer which method they suggest.....well, I think we know the answer. I read in the Janvil, GT and the AGRR mag as well as the newsletter from the NWRA that curing lights should be used.

Time is money but does'nt curing with a top of the line light take less time than sunlight?

Starquest,
Don't want to cause a problem, but where did you get these facts from?
Hours or days to sun cure repairs??? A lamp is 20-40 % more effective than sunlight.

I think where you live and the time of day has alot to do with it, here in Florida the sun cures around twice as fast as my lamp.

I very rarely use a lamp ... in all my time doing rock chips I have had a single chip come back AFTER I fixed it that had broken out. If the goal of fixing the chip is so it will not crack out then using a lamp has absolutely no effect on that. I have done probably 15-20 thousand chips personally and I can say only maybe a handfull of those have been with a curing lamp. If there is another reason fro using a lamp besides curing the resin so it doesn't crack out then please let me know .. but I think the proof is in the pudding that it makes absolutely no difference whether you use a lamp or sun on the longevity of the repair staying repaired. I would also put my repairs up against anybodies in terms of clarity and quality of repair so I don't, and probably never will, believe it makes an aesthetic difference.

I've only done a couple hundreds and I would challenge you Jeremiah!! j/k

*Bows down*