The windshield on my 68' Cutlass shows it age (has some minor light scratches) and I wanted to know if any of you guys know a good way or product or process to restore automotive glass? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

Other than replacing the windshield, the only thing you can do is polish the widshield. Glass polish will work on light scratches. If you drag a finger nail across a scratch and the nail catches, the rule of thumb is the scratch is too deep. Eastwood Co. carries or used to carry a polishing kit. You can also find them online, such as ebay. you get a small buffer pad and the compound. Use a drill for the buffer. Paper off everything outside the glass - hood, top, doors. The stuff flies. It takes work but produces results. I took wiper marks or scrapes off my wife's car.

 

When I was in the glass business, we used Cerium Oxide to polish windshields. Mix it with water to a thin cream and polish with a thick felt wheel in a drill. Keep it moving and keep it moist as you go. We generally tried to build a "wall" of shop rags around the area to help contain the spatter. As mentioned, if your fingernail catches, forget it. Also, there will be a slight bit of distortion where you polish. Good luck with it.

 

Thanks guys!!

 

If it is within your budget, install a new one. You will be amazed how much better your car will look, and how much better you will see out of it. Besides the scratches you can easily see, there's lots of imperceptible scratches that kind of invisibly "cloud" the glass. Polishing out scratches is an art, and most of the time you won't get all of it. Shop around - you can probably get one installed for less than 250.00.

 

Some times its not worth the hassle if its bad. Distortion and time consumption. Unless your concerned with keeping original glass. If not I usually get Safe Light to replace them, about 300 bucks complete job and they come to you!
my2cents
Good luck!

 

Thanks again guys for all the great pointers/tips. I might have to end up replacing the glass, we'll see.

 

I 'third' the notion of getting new glass. I had a '75 Delta 88 back in the '90s, and it had some wiper scratches on it. It took me about 2 minutes to figure out that they were too deep to polish out. A local auto glass shop came out to the house and installed a new one for about $200 as I recall. It was WELL worth it because, as costpenn says, you don't notice how overall bad the old glass is until you compare it to the new. The difference will be like night and day, and you'll have modern safety glass in there to boot.