12 Jul 06
We've just had a spot of bother with the RAV4's windscreen.
A few weeks ago, on meeting a lump of aggregate coming the other way from a newly resurfaced local road, it cracked from the top left-hand corner right across the middle of the screen. I'm actually amazed at how quickly the crack spread across the screen - an indication, presumably, of the substantial everyday torsional forces exerted on such a large sheet of glass.
Happily, the car's insurance cover comes complete with a hotline manned by an entirely switched-on operative, who merely needed to know whether our specimen was equipped with rain-sensing wipers or not (mercifully, not) before booking in a visiting time for their at-home RAC screen replacement service. The only caveat was that the process takes some two hours and, much like any parcel delivery these days, the nice lady couldn't tell me when this would start, other than some time in the morning...
Typically, then, I was still staggering about in pyjamas when the RAC van turned up this morning and two blokes started removing the extraordinary number of bits that need to come off the car before the damaged screen could be cut free and lifted clear. The good news, however, is that a laminated screen such as this comes out in one piece, rather than the 6345 square fragments of yore, a handful of which inevitably continued to spit from the air vents for weeks afterwards.
