Next up on my list of things to do was to install the front windshield and rear window. I had previously tried to put in the rear window myself with no success and had heard that the front windshield installation was no picnic either. So I called around the club to see if anyone knew of a friendly, patient windshield guy. Rich Cwik's guy had done one before, so he never returned my calls. That should have told me something. I went to the on line yellow pages and just picked out a local shop that had some good reviews from a car guy getting glass put into his street rod. A 57 Chevy is not quite a Lotus Europa, but then again it's not your every day Toyota Corolla installation either. I made an appointment for Saturday. Saturday came and I set up the windshield on a table in the garage and waited and waited and waited. I putzed around on various items, but did not want to get too involved with anything. The appointment was for between 12 and 2. As 2 o'clock started approaching I called the glass place and was told the guy got hung up on a job in Oswego but was on his way. Oswego? Why did I bother with a local place if the installer was at a job 60 miles away? I waited and waited some more. This was the night for our annual Lotus Corps go-kart event so we had to be on the road by 4. I started scheming in my head. Who could I call to come out and car sit while the guy installed the glass? Would I be able to trust him to just shut the garage when he was done? Maybe he was real good and we could just finish it all up in 30 minutes - yeah right.
Well it was all answered real quickly when Hose B showed up at 3:30 Hose B is Jose's shorter brother. He was shorter than Bill Greenwald if you can imagine that. Hose B did not speak a word of English and I think you can imagine that in today's world. Not exactly confidence inspiring. After showing him what needed to be done and seeing the overwhelmed deer in the headlights look in his eyes he got his boss on the cell phone and we scheduled for his boss to come out and do the job himself later in the week. Paul had come by during this last minute commotion so we had a few 12 ounce cans of go-kart event preparation fluids. Team Zog, consisting of Mike, John, Sue and Bob Herzog along with Paul Quiniff won the event that night by the way, so the day was not a total loss. At least the go-kart win was Lots-O-Fun and very satisfying!
Thursday came along and again I had the garage prepped for the window installation. Again I waited and waited and waited. I was on the phone to Fox Valley to see who they recommend for windshield preparation when the windshield boss finally showed up... 3 1/2 hours late. I immediately suspected this would not go well either. He left his truck running (something that really pisses me off) while I explained how everything was supposed to be installed. He started working on the back window, insisting that the locking bead would be easier to install if we installed the rubber in backwards. He was crawling around on the inside of the car while on his cell phone trying to run his business. He was struggling just to get the rubber gasket to stay in place as I taped it in place. 20 minutes into things as I was getting the heat gun out to help soften up the gasket he just turned to me and said sorry - he was turning the job down. Well thanks for nothing! I kicked him out, popped a cold one and called the glass guy that Fox Valley uses. He returned my call the next day and although he was very nice, he recognized that this job would not be a slam dunk, so he just turned it down over the phone. Time for plan D? I conferred with my resource - Paul, and we decided to give it a go ourselves.
On my next trip to the garage I spent a couple hours with my heat gun trying to straighten out the plastic strip that gets cut into 4 pieces and glued around the edges of the front windshield. Every time I straightened it out however, it would begin to curl back up so I ended up taping it to a couple of long wooden window trim strips I had laying about. I left it that way on the floor for a couple days to take a set. Also, this gave me time to build up patience to work on the project again.
Paul came out one evening and we plotted out the steps for the front window. The next day I began cutting the strips to size and pushing them onto the windshield. I cut the strips down to the correct size, mitering the corners with an old X-acto saw. The corner chrome pieces fit over the strips to make a somewhat nice finished corner. The next day I heated up the plastic strips with the heat gun, being very careful not to melt them and then glued the strips onto the windshield. I held everything in place over night with a lot of tape.
The next day Paul and Dennis Stahl came out to assist in getting messy. We did a trial fit of the windshield and then installed some butyl rubber around the opening using a caulk gun. We also installed a couple rubber strips to assist in holding the windshield in the right place. We plopped the windshield into place and began pushing it down. This took a while. Once we had it in place we taped off the red painted area and applied some professional windshield glue between the fiberglass and the plastic strips, again using the caulking gun. We only cut a tiny hole in the tip of the caulk tube so we could get it up under the plastic strip. This required so much effort to squeeze that I soon ran out of squeezing muscle. Luckily Paul has extraordinary GI Joe-Kung Foo Grip and was able to complete the task. Start to finish the front windshield took us about 3 hours. Now the clean up. My fingers were a mess with black goop all over me; and my sweatshirt was trash. Paul had a little on his hands and a couple racing stripes on his sweatshirt. Dennis remained Mr. Clean.
We turned our attention to the rear glass and spent several hours pushing and tugging and squeezing and scratching our heads, but we just couldn't get the back window into the new rubber gasket. We tried the old gasket and had it partially installed but it was so tired and tom that it just looked terrible, so we stopped to think some more. We placed a call to Mr. Congeniality who went crawling up into his garage attic for us. Aha! His rear window was only 1/8" thick whereas mine was 1/4". Therefore we concluded we had the wrong gasket or the wrong window. Seeing as how this was the only gasket available for a Europa, I made the trip down to Lyons that night and traded Bill one thick rear window for a thin one. He's not going to use a rear window on his Europa Del Sol anyway. More of a flow through ventilation. Thanks Bill!
Next day I attacked the rear window again but couldn't quite get the stiff new gasket to accept the somewhat flimsy new/old glass. As I was pushing on the glass I was really afraid that the flimsy thing would just shatter and I would be spewing red blood on my red car. Not wishing to do this, I cleaned up Bill's original gasket which was not bad and slipped that into place. After a lot of pushing and squeezing and contortions, I had the rear glass in the old gasket in about 2 hours. Success... or at least partial success! I then started working on the locking bead that gets inserted into the middle of the rubber all the way around the glass. That I could do up to a point. I got the bottom part fished through but could not make the turn. Too tight of a turn. I tried the top and found that I could get the straight part in but again could not make the turn. So if you look at the installed window now real close you may notice that the locking strip is installed all the way around except the right side which has a little bead of black silicone. Looks fine and it will never fall out. I remember now that when I got the car originally from Rich it did not have any locking strip so things should be OK. After 8 hours in the garage working on that stupid rear glass my fingers were so sore I could barely pop the top on a cold one... but I did!
Next - Europa Euphoria, Part 30
