View From The Trenches

I don’t know anything more distasteful about my job than when I come in contact with an installation that represents the worst sort of practices that can be associated with my trade. On message boards or in talking with other auto glaziers, the term “hack” is spat out in the lowest sort of derisive tone and terms when speaking of a person or company whose glazing practices reflect the worst possible kind, making it difficult to raise consumer confidence in our industry.

What are “hacks?” Are they made or are they abominations that occur naturally? Do people who are actually paid to install auto glass parts take shortcuts on purpose or are they merely following orders?

I suppose that trying to define a hack is somewhat like trying to identify obscenity. The definition changes for every person, but you know it when you see it. The big question for me is why do people hack and how can they keep doing it on purpose?

Installing auto glass is not brain surgery. If you use commonsense and some intelligence, have some physical strength, proper tools and can learn the underlying principles of the trade, such as glazing techniques, removals and corrosion prevention, it is not that hard of a trade to master. Why then are we seeing more and more installation disasters than ever before?

This is an industry-wide problem. In some cases it is fostered by greed, individual or corporate. Pay for performance or piecework certainly (and implicitly) rewards speed over all else. While some companies penalize technicians for comebacks, a duality exists. There is an expectation that an installer can perform a certain number of glass operations on a daily basis. That performance level is set by an owner or manager whose own income is influenced by the output of those they employ. Fail to meet those standards on a regular basis and your future with that concern very well may come into question.

So are poor and dangerous practices entirely the fault of individual installers or do they represent an entire company culture? Simply put, it is both. Send a mobile technician out with eight jobs and 150 miles to cover in a day, and you are asking for trouble.

Employing an assembly line process in your shop in which a customer can drive in, have a windshield installed and have his/her car released back within an hour also may be an indicator.

What other indicators are there that may suggest a hack exists? Jump cowels? No use of primers? Slashed dashboard? What about scratched and unprimed pinchwelds? Broken and un-replaced clips are either ignored or just glued down? Re-uses mouldings? Cuts the top from a wraparound moulding and glues it back in? Uses any sort of generic moulding as a substitute moulding? What if an installer leaves broken glass inside a door panel? Better yet, stuffs paper or adhesive inside to quiet the rattle of the un-removed glass? The sad part is that almost every “sinful” activity named above is usually hidden or covered over, making the consumer ignorant of what has just occurred.

The fault easily can lie with either owners or installers. That alone is a major problem. Asking certain owners or managers for clips or an OE moulding can incur their wrath upon the tech. One trait I have observed over the years is that the student usually is never as good as the teacher and the teacher can very well be just another hack. Abhorrent installation practices are handed down from one tech to another, solidifying the fact of keeping the concept and reality of being a hack alive.

Large corporate companies employ the concept of “deniability:” make the tech responsible for his or her work despite the fact that his or her workload is managed solely by someone else. A manager may set the performance bar so high that an installer feels pressured into taking shortcuts, and over time those shortcuts may define the quality of workmanship.

Let’s use the auto auction contract as an example. Normally large glass installation companies win these contracts due to low pricing and high volume along with high labor demand. The outcome of these installations somewhat reflects the state of our industry. Simply put, when a team of installers swarms over a large number of cars needing windshields installed in a very short time, the outcome does not favor glass integrity. It is where some of the worst installation sins can be inflicted upon a car since there is virtually no traceable repercussion to shoddy workmanship.

However, being a hack just isn’t about being big. Perhaps the greatest number of people who should be banned from ever practicing auto glazing own or operate their very small businesses. Who needs liability coverage when all they own is a 10-year-old Toyota pick-up? These are people that may very well have been fired for incompetence or drug use from somewhere else. Worse yet, many are self-taught. I see car detailers every year quit and go into the glass business after watching other installers work on their lots. I often have observed guys getting on their cell phones and calling someone for help as they try to remove a moulding, a mirror bracket or loosen a cowl and can’t.

These problems all boil down to the “easy entry” and lack of accountability and of all of the problems that face this industry, these two perhaps are the most serious and have the least chance of being solved. If laws are enacted so that one has to prove competency to buy products and have traceable parts to prove liability, that is a beginning to a solution to those two plagues. However, there are too many forces both inside and outside the auto glass sector that have an economic benefit from non-regulation. If the government can acknowledge that fraud in the Medicare system is costing them $60 billion a year and they don’t increase controls measurably, how can one expect any sort of reform in our industry?

All we can hope for is if Congress awards the contract for windshield replacement for their fleet of vehicles to the lowest and unlicensed bidder. Perhaps then and only then when their SUVs and limos rust out or become aquariums on wheels will hope for any sort of positive change come. I am sure some industry insiders are hoping that oversight is transferred to the Department of the Interior. In that case, we may very well see the opportunity of having our herds of installers thinned.

The big banks may have their bailouts and states may receive their stimulus funding. However, most small businesses (especially auto glass shops) realize that there is little help out there designed to treat our economic ailments. Still whenever I hear that there are rain clouds on the horizon, it usually means that Mother Nature has her own recovery package in store at least for me, as it was the case this week.

Rain is not a very common event in my part of California. For one thing, it is seasonal. Very often, a person living in Central or Southern California will not see any precipitation from April to October. Annual averages for many large cities are rarely 20 inches a year and the further south in the state one goes those numbers shrink even lower. It’s a great climate in many ways but it does very little to promote any sort of checks and balances when it comes to structural or moisture integrity in auto glass installation. In other words, many sins lie undetected until the first hard and steady rain soaks the state. When that event does occur, like it did last week, the phones start ringing off the hook with lots of new business.

The new work basically breaks down into two or three areas. There are a fair number of people who won’t replace their broken door glasses until the first rain. Most of these cars are bone fide “clunkers” that are more than seven years old and many of their owners have economic reasons to put off replacement until they absolutely need to. Motivation oftentimes is increased exponentially due to the realization that unless something is done, the car in question may be transformed into a mobile aquarium. Working on these “classics” can oftentimes be a challenge simply in trim panel or mechanical integrity. Ancient Egyptian mummies can withstand more handling in many circumstances and more times than not share similar status in conditions. Still many older techs appreciate the opportunity to stroll down Memory Lane and have some working room for both our hands and vacuums that we lack in most of the cars of today.

I still have a fair number of new car dealerships that get calls for water leaks that fall under warranty claims. About half of my service appointments last week came under this category. There is nothing that says “it’s your day” when after a 20-minute search within a Service Department parking lot, you finally locate the object of your work order—a pick-up truck with a leaky rear slider that has a hard cover installed over the bed.

I got off easy on that one. Thankfully, I had a factory urethane release situation on a Tacoma, which allowed me minimal removal of inside trim and physical effort in excision. Most times, however, on new cars, I am faced with all sorts of factory flubs that require a diligent and patient approach to first detect and then repair water leaks. To complicate matters more, new designs incorporate bonded encapsulation or under-lip mouldings that interfere with removal or repair. As many glass techs know, just because water may appear near a glass part, there is no sure thing when it comes to determining cause. All too many service mechanics instantly blame glass seals if they find water within an arm’s length of a window. Roof and moulding seams along with missed welds can factor in all too often. The last thing I want to have happen is to be called back and be informed that the original R&I that I performed was not the solution to the original problem. For instance, when the Dodge Dakota first came out with an extra cab, I had several dealers that had complaints about leaky windshields. It seemed that the conditions had to be either during or after a long steady rain, water would drip down the windshield when owners would make turns while driving. Once the glass was removed there was no physical detectable reason for the windshield to be leaking. My first few attempts at a simple R&R returned under the same circumstances so chagrined and embarrassed, it got very personal with me to fix this water leak. Logically it had to be coming through the pinchweld and after almost a half day of searching and testing, the leak was traced to the bolts that secured a trim cover above the quarter glass. One month later the dealership receives a factory technical service bulletin outlining the source and repair procedure. I could have used it much sooner.

With the above already stated, previously replaced auto glass is both the boon and bane of my existence during the California rainy season. As the years have passed and the number of glass “installers” has seemingly mushroomed, water leak repair is my most profitable yet seasonal income source. It seems that due to cowl jumping and other speed factors that create large gaps I have needed to R&R more and more windshields rather than just using additional sealant to spot stop a leak. It is time-consuming, stressful but profitable. In one day this week, I ran the gamut of poor installs in two instances.

This past Thursday I received a call from a dealer to fix a water leak in an ‘05 Acura RL. (FW2522) The car had been passed from the service department to their body shop and then to me. When I arrived I found a windshield that had been replaced using factory glass. Every clip under the post mouldings had been broken and urethaned down to hold them in place. The two-part cowl had fasteners missing and cowl clips mangled. I was informed that water entry appeared to be coming from the top left corner. All I did was to push up on the inside of the windshield and caused it to partially release. In fact the glass was so loose across the top and partially down the sides, I can’t believe the car’s owner didn’t notice any unusual sounds or moisture when he washed the car. Once the glass was removed it was fairly obvious that installer error or negligence had occurred with the latter being the more likely due to adhesive application or the lack of the use of a glass primer.

That afternoon, another service dept client called me to repair a water leak in an ‘07 Toyota RAV4, which was sold under their Certified Used Car program. This vehicle was certifiably a wading pool with about a gallon of water ponding in the passenger front floor well due to the effects of a jumped cowl install. Since I have lost this dealership’s used car glass account to the worst kind of hacks that infest this industry, I have no problem having them pay me dearly for a proper re-install, perhaps even more than they paid for the original replacement. What irritates me the most is that I have to work twice as hard in removing and trying to save a cheap Chinese windshield that is far easier to crack than most. In this case I had to use Squire wire for the most part in order to remove the old glass, which we all know takes far more time than any other removal process.

People refuse to think about outcomes. The less you pay in glass in this country, the more chances you will pay later on repairing damage inflicted upon one’s vehicle.

It is indeed a myth that “it never rains in California.”After enduring one of the slowest Septembers in my company’s history, Mother Nature has done a far better job in stimulating this particular owner than any bailout could do. However it has not stopped me from considering changing my company’s name to “Goldman “Sax” Auto Glass” to see what collateral government aid I could procure.

During these trying times, many of us may very well have the habit of overlooking some of the smaller items that can influence our lives. I, for one have made a vow this week to make up for a serious oversight and have promised to take my most used tools—my set of cold knives—to lunch this week.

First of all, it is about time these hard working guys get some serious recognition. I just don’t have just one cable cold knife; I keep five of these babies handy, each with different length blades inside my top tray. Some techs might think that number is overkill. It’s my opinion that the number is just right.

The reality is I’m not quite sure if I could actually complete very many removals without using cable knives, rendering them perhaps the most used and needed tool in my collection. In fact, a few years ago, in the haste to get to an install, I left my entire set inside a car I was removing a quarter glass for a body shop. I truly felt my age when I had to excuse myself to the customer and scoot backwards 10 miles and retrieve those needed implements

One would think that using this very basic removal tool would be superseded by technology by now. In truth I believe I use these guys more than ever. One can make the case that as auto designers come up with more flush mount glazing with raw edge surfaces, the glass techs, especially mobile ones, have fallen back to use fewer mechanical solutions when the situation arises to remove these tight fitting windows.

In no way am I diminishing the need for owning a power removal tool. I personally would not be caught dead without one. It is just that in many cases, a tech doesn’t need to use an air- or battery-powered tool to cut the major part of most urethane seals that surround glass.

Over time, there have been a few, very appreciated improvements to the cold knife design. The lever release to affect a quick blade exchange is not only useful in time savings but the location of the cable pull handle has been moved away from the head of the blade. This design change removed the need for a securing nut and bolt, giving the tech more tool clearance from possible paint and body contact. In the past few years, blades have had Teflon or other coatings applied that offer some protective qualities in the hope to minimize surface damage as well.

I mentioned that I use five different sizes of blades. I have a cold knife that not only uses the four most common lengths of blades (¾-, 1-, 1 ¼- and 1 ½-inch ) but I have found that using a “stubby” blade made from an old ¾-inch has become one of my most used knives.

Here is how it helps. It makes that first cut far easier on your body for one thing. For example, many of the older techs had to deal with early Escorts. This was one situation in which Ford was rarely generous with urethane application. Since this was well before the invention of thin, coined cut-out blades so one solution was to grind down blades to make short cuts with, almost like a scoring pass to make the way easier for something longer. Maybe I am just getting weaker, but I’m finding many removals less trouble by starting out with a stubby first. It takes just a little more time but less of a toll on the arms and back.

When I am dealing with these under-lip molding designs like the new Toyotas, I always first use a stubby to cut and leave the molding in place. Then I run the upper perimeter using the next two larger blades to finish cutting the urethane. The moulding usually stays in place to act as an additional barrier against accidental contact with paint. For R& R’s when one has flush mounted glass that uses a dam and has clearance for an outer removal, I use a Stubby to cut the dam and by doing so, lessen the chance for any longer blade to catch and twist when pulling. On Jeep Wranglers, the stubby can get inside and make a cut in some cases. It also allows you to measure what areas you may be able to cut with a cold knife before you use other methods.

I am hardly the first (nor will I be the last) installer who modifies his cold knife. Blades are ground down to maximum thinness and honed to extreme sharpness by many who practice our trade. I do get a laugh from the occasional body man or rank amateur who show me a cold knife that they have purchased and have complained loudly of their inability to cut a glass out with a fat dull blade.

I applaud those techs who can use an air or electric removal tool and cut the entire windshield or tempered part out without wreaking massive damage to the surrounding areas. As the famous philosopher/detective Harry Callahan once uttered, “A man has got to know his limitations.” I tend to know mine by now and I certainly lack that total skill (despite owning an Equalizer product of some kind for at least 20 years).

I don’t embrace technology effortlessly. I usually am not the first one on my block with a new invention or appliance. The one real exception to that rule would have been an immediate purchase of a large-screen HD video monitor had glass profits not tanked. I still find comfort and confidence pulling a cable knife around as much of a windshield’s perimeter as possible. I simply want to feel I possess as much control of the operation as possible.

Not sure where I’m going to take the boys to eat this week. Most likely it will be take-out, probably Subway with its $5 foot-long deals. I’m fairly sure my dear wife won’t understand that Mr. Stubby was the one wanting Hooters’ hot wings for his meal.