Dear Listers,
During the fitting of the Plexiglass canopy on my RV-8, I managed to put some pretty
disheartening scratches in the windscreen section. You can see from the
pictures that they looked pretty bad. A call to Van's revealed that a replacement
canopy would be $640 + $250 shipping to California! Ack.
So what to do... A bit of surfing and I found this "Scratch Off" windshield repair
kit for $35 on the Aircraft Spruce web site:
http://www.aircraftspruce.com/catalog/cspages/scratchoff.php
Frankly, it just seemed too good to be true. Nothing for $35 could be that "magic"
I thought, but what did I have to lose at this point....
Well, the kit arrived yesterday and I decided to give it a try tonight. In a word:
WOW! In about 2 hours the windscreen looked as good as new - no kidding
- AS GOOD AS NEW! The pictures really don't do the repair justice. It looks
better in person.
There are basically two sponges in the kit with four decreasingly porous pastes.
You just put some of the first paste on the sponge and buff it in with a drill
at 1200 RPM or less. Then you wash everything down good including the sponge
and windshield with warm water. Then you use the next finer paste and repeat
the process. Etc, etc, until you've used the 4th paste that is kind of like
car wax.
Frankly, the scratches were gone after the first application of paste - I started
at #2 based on the instructions and the "observed severity" of the scratch
depth.
So, the bottom line is, if you've got scuffs or mild scratches in your Plexiglass
buy this repair kit. It works!
Matt Dralle
RV-8 #82880
