While a lot of people never experience this mishap, you would be surprised at just how often this form of car damage actually occurs. Sure, the only sensible thing left for you to do here is to repair the vehicle, however, what happens until this repair can take place. How do you prepare your vehicle in the meantime, where do you fund this repair from and who do you take it to? In order to answer all of these questions, here’s a brief guide on how to protect a broken car window until it can be repaired, as well as a couple of suggestions on how you can repair it.
1. Preparing the window
First of all, you need to remove as many shards of broken glass as possible. No matter how stable it may look at the time, the rest of the glass will fall off, as well, thus causing a cutting risk. Therefore, put on your protective gloves and start removing all the biggest shards. Once you’re done, you need to make sure that there are no leftovers and the simplest way to do so is to pick up the vacuum cleaner.
Make sure to vacuum your entire car, seeing as how the event that broke the glass might have shattered it over the entire interior of your vehicle. As soon as you’re done, you need to wipe the window frame clean and seal the frame area with something like duct tape, in order to prevent the dust from penetrating the area.
Finally, you can grab some packing tape and use it to temporarily seal the area, just so that you can make sure that there’s no free air flow inside until you get to fix it. Make horizontal stripes until you’ve completely sealed off the vehicle. Keep in mind, nonetheless, that this step is merely there to protect you from wind and rain (not entirely efficient) and it can’t do much against burglary. All it would take is the simplest of blades for one to gain access to the inside of your vehicle. Therefore, you need to fix the issue right away.
2. Check if your insurance will cover it
Regardless of how you decide to proceed here, you’ll have to fund this repair. Therefore, your first step needs to be checking if your insurance will actually cover this. You would be surprised to learn that your insurance policy might not be all-enveloping. Namely, damage often takes place due to fire, theft, weather occurrences, acts of God (damage that takes place from natural causes without human agency) or even vandalism. However, damage caused by the most common source (the one caused by a collision) is usually not covered.
3. Find specialists
Another thing you need to bear in mind is the fact that while this repair may seem like something standard, the process itself can be facilitated by finding auto window replacement and repair specialists. This way, you’ll be able to rest assured that the end result is just as good as the original setup was. Also, the amount of work will differ, depending on if it’s a rear or a side mirror replacement that you need. All in all, it’s better to entrust this to someone who knows what they’re doing.
In conclusion
The very last thing you need to keep in mind is the fact that protecting a broken car window sometimes comes as a matter of necessity. If you could just drive your car to the mechanic as soon as the window is broken, that would definitely be for the best. Sadly, sometimes you’ll have to resort to these kinds of temporary solutions and being prepared for this is always a plus.
