A shop owner and technician proved that adherence to safety standards and attention to detail pay off.
Aaron Bradford is the owner of Auto Glass Safety Council (AGSC) Registered Member shop Driftwood Auto Glass in Brunswick, Georgia. He is also an AGSC certified master technician who recently replaced the windshield of an Isuzu box truck for one of his larger accounts. It was a relatively routine job.
The truck still had its original windshield, making Bradford’s work easier. That’s because he didn’t have to account for another technician’s technique on a previous replacement.
“Being the first on the job is always ideal,” he says.
The truck Aaron Bradford worked on got in an accident hours after he replaced the windshield.
Bradford prioritizes following the Automotive Glass Replacement Safety Standard (AGRSS) as well as adhesive and vehicle manufacturer instructions. This time, he’s particularly glad he did so.
Six hours after Bradford installed the new windshield, the truck was in an accident that smashed its front end. Bradford inspected the damage when he returned to his fleet account’s site to work on another vehicle.
“I checked it over,” Bradford says. “I pushed on the windshield from the inside to ensure we’d done our job properly.”
The glass remained adhered despite a crease in the metal near the pinchweld, which could have easily affected the windshield bond. Bradford credits this to his attention to the AGRSS Standard and the urethane manufacturer’s minimum drive-away time (MDAT) instructions.
Though damage near the pinch weld could have caused the windshield to detach from the vehicle’s body, it stayed bonded.
“MDAT is one of those things that’s important, but sometimes gets overlooked on mobile jobs,” he says.
Bradford believes his urethane application method also helped keep the windshield attached to the vehicle.
“On these particular vehicles, I typically run an adhesive on the glass itself so it doesn’t bond to the moulding instead,” he says.
Bradford cautions technicians to keep scenarios like this in mind.
“It’s important not to take shortcuts. We never know who will end up in an accident,” he says, adding that auto glass replacement isn’t just a way to make a living. It can also save lives.
Slow news week obviously as this is not even that bad of a crash