 | Bob Crager of Lewis Street Glass is a 26 year veteran in the glass business. Lewis Street Glass is a leading Wichita Glass company, serving the entire Wichita/Sedgwick County area since 1919. They do anything and everything having to do with glass, both residential and commercial. They also do Auto glass. They are located at 743 South Market, facing Kellogg on the South, and you can reach them by phone at (316) 263-8259. You can email Bob Crager at bcrager@lewisstreetglass.com |
Glass
2013-02-01 09:59:53
Antique truck and glass restoration
Q-I’m just about finished with the complete restoration of my old classic car, and need help with the glass parts. Those are very hard to find. Where do I turn for help?
A-The Starbird Show last month was another impressive presentation with amazing custom cars and trucks from all over the country on display. There were a lot of local custom car and truck club members in attendance and were, as always, enthusiastic about the custom cars and other “street rods” they saw there. As to your question about getting the glass to complete your restoration, we’ve heard that question so many times over the years, and as you point out, you can have the sweetest running engine with the neatest looking paint job on the coolest looking car you have ever laid your eyes on, but if the glass parts are damaged or missing, you’ll never really enjoy driving it as much as you would if the glass problems were solved. The glass parts end up being an important part of your restoration, and it matters not whether you’ve entered it into that 100 point competition, or are just going to use it to turn heads as you tool it down the street. The absolute finishing touch will be how attentive you were with the glass. And that’s an absolute fact!
As you may or may not know, the older glass parts for custom cars and trucks can be looked at as being in about three separate categories. Those categories generally fall into the years of production for that particular car or truck.
The first category is “flat glass”, laminated and tempered for use in the windows, windshields, etc. This was used primarily from about 1920 through about 1965, and due to the fact of these vehicles being out of production now for 45 to 90 years, most glass shops do not have the original patterns for those glass replacements. Being able to replicate that original glass pattern is critically important to your successful restoration project, and being able to work with a local glass shop that has those patterns and can utilize their own highly trained installers to complete the glasswork will be a huge advantage for you on your classic vehicle’s complete restoration.
The second category of auto/truck glass included “curved or bent” glass, and was used from about 1948 to the 1980’s. There are many antique vehicles that are now very rare, and therefore the curved glass that is available will always be in short supply, whether it is reproduced or NOS (new old stock). The glass manufacturers who make this glass are not going to reproduce glass for vehicles that are few in number. So if there’s a special glass you’re going to be needing, it might be good to go ahead and check out your options and how to go about getting that glass you’ll need before you actually need it.
Then there’s the dash glass, where we actually fabricate the pieces for flat dial restorations on vehicles built from about 1939 through about 1950+. There are some really cool pieces of dash glass from that era, and absent a full service glass shop with that fabrication capability, those pieces can be really hard to come by. The tools to make patterns for a wide assortment of glass for the restoration of the older vehicles are also not found in most glass shops. Authentic reproduction and replacement of the flat dash glass on vehicles in this age group is critically important to the correct finished look. If you’re restoring the antique dials and gauges, make sure you finish that job off with the proper glass pieces that are called for. If you’re going to do vehicle glass restoration to any serious degree, you have to have access to the tools and the patterns, and installation techs that really care about the finished product.
When you get into those antique vehicles that utilized a lot of “curved glass” for the windows, you begin to find that these windows are getting pretty rare and hard to find. When you need replacement glass for these, you’ll see that it is becoming pretty much in short supply, due to the fact that the glass manufacturers who make reproduction glass like this produce very little of it because they don’t have a lot of calls for it. Supply and demand controls the market there.
A good local full service glass dealer just may be able to help you locate that unique piece of glass you’ll need to fully restore that antique vehicle. So go ahead and take those fenders and bodies down to the bare metal, have them powder coated, primed, and layer on those finish coats of paint or lacquer. But don’t stop after you’ve chromed all the brake lines, carburetors, and other parts and re-covered all the interior surfaces. Make a call or a stop by your local full service glass dealer’s location, and order those new window glass replacements and dash instrument flat glass pieces. That way, you can finish that job up right! Some of the information for this article was researched on the world wide web…More next month.
