Glass Scratch Removal

jlcustomz

evil painter
I've tried a little glass scratch repair here & there over the years without much success. Cerum oxide powder isn't good for much & some sanding pads just left too much mess to get back clear in any reasonable amount of time. For heavy scuffs on glass, metal polishes have helped as much as anything.

Last year at the day job, they got me a glass weld g-force basic setup from a trade show (commercial building products). The pad & polish combined with pressure , friction, & heat move the glass surface sort of like ironing. A pump up water bottle feeds water through the center of the disc to keep wet.

Does it work as good as the show sales display?? Not really because they make their own scratches, I run into a lot of scratches from sand & stucco on glass that are much deeper .Also some of these commercial building tempered glass I run into seem to be much harder and not practical to even try repairing a small scratch. But it does work great on heavy scuffs & lighter scratches particularly on softer annealed glass. My first test before work jobs was about a foot long patch of wiper scratches almost an inch wide on company van windshield , which were right in my direct view when driving. They were deeper than what was really feasible to repair & I got almost all of them gone in a little over an hour, first try. There is a hint of distortion in certain bright light, probably only because damage was so deep. Tried on heavy scratches in side tempered el camino window glass, It definitely lessened them, but could not remove. May later try the actual sanding pads I recently got that didn't come with base kit. Success with commercial & residential door & window glass has been hit & miss, but at least I'm learning now what's feasible & what's not. Several attempts removed worst of an area of scratches, but not all. Acceptable in some cases.

Just figured I'd give this a mention as general information. Bottom line is that scratch removal is best for shallower damage in smaller areas. It's also really only feasible where it can be done labor wise for less than glass replacement. A large amount of work should be reserved ONLY for the old hard to find glass and requires a ton of patience.
Here's a before & after pic of standard commercial annealed glass repair (between tape) & link to tool. Camera made some weird lines in pic that are not scratches. Scratches are all gone. Show price we got a tool for was less than website..
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3m had a system many years ago, prob 20+. a buffer with a water feed through the center of the pad then there were different grades of trizact paper and a final compound. this would get used frequently where i worked. i remember rule of thumb was if you can catch your fingernail in the scratch it was too deep but anything shallower they were able to get it out.
 
Yea Jim, that was pretty much rule of thumb for most setups. With this base setup it actually moves the glass a little bit rather than sanding it and gets out 500 grit sanding scratches pretty quickly with just 1 pad & compound. It all has it's limits though. With their sanding pads for actual glass removal, you either go 180 & 500 or 320 & 1000, then compound.
I had some sort of 3" or 4 " 3-m sanding discs years ago, I think light green ,orange, & some other color. Not being part of a system with compound better than cerum oxide (red clay), It wasn't very effective.
 
Gave this thing a slight try on our year old glass top stove. Right front burner gets most use. It got a lot of scuffs & light scratches out quickly. There were a few stupid heavy scratches that only smoothed out a little, but showed up in pic more due to compound stuck in deep scars, a downside to polish products. Wasn't worth trying sanding discs first here. After pic looks much better in person, camera shows flash lines that aren't even there.
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