martin said:
I am just reporting what I was told. I am not glass expert and thought I'd ask the guy who put 64 hours into my XJ to fix the cruise control and got paid for 6 hours.
After that much time he acts like a crew chief of an Army Helicopter who "lets" the Aviator fly it for a mission. I tried LED tail light bulbs for the brake lights and the cruise control stopped working, I went back to normal bulbs and it worked again. The chilton manual even says bad bulbs can cause the cruise control to stop working.
When I am in there again I'll go ask him about the gasket again. I think the gasket would look better with my Pioneer trim of black door handles. I have the shinny aluminum trim on there now.
Martin, as AZjeff and others say, that mechanic is full of, umm...well, it ain't urethane. The later windshields are glued in with urethane just like the old ones. The only difference is that instead of snapping in the trim after it's installed, the new ones have the gasket placed over the edge of the glass first. However, the gasket (a misnomer really, because it's really just a plastic trim ring - it neither retains nor seals the glass) does not wrap very far around the back edge of the glass, and the adhesive bead still sticks to the glass, not the gasket. I had a junkyard '95 windshield in my 87 with the later trim salvaged, and when it broke, my daughter bought another windshield and they reused the trim a third time. This was done both times with the original trim attachment posts intact.
However, he is probably right about the leaking. My original installation of the 95 window in the 87 leaked, and my 95 leaks now. Or at least it did until I goobed a huge quantity of sealant into the top of the gasket and covered it with a half mile of duct tape. I have yet to remove the duct tape to see if the sealant succeeded. You definitely need to do it carefully, and because the trim is already on the windshield there's less opportunity to add sealant later if there's a gap or a flaw. The usual way to do a replacement windshield is to cut through the original urethane bead, hoping that you're slicing it more or less midway down the diameter of the bead, and to leave the part that's still on the body in place, adhering the new glass to the old urethane, rather than cleaning it all the way down to the metal. This can work very well, and is apparently considered to be safer and neater than using a pre-formed bead (you can buy this in a roll, like Mortite caulking, but adhesion is iffy) or a huge new bead of liquid urethane (messy, and hard to get the height right), but you must be sure that there is no separation of the old bead caused by rust or prior poor installation. Make sure that's checked very carefully, and fix those spots first, or you'll have water pouring in and wind noise. It's amazing how small a gap can cause a big leak.
