A rock chip is a twenty minute job. The same chip after a week of hot afternoons can be a full replacement. Repair costs a fraction of replacement, keeps your factory glass and factory seal, and is often covered outright by insurance.
Repair works by pulling the air out of the break and forcing a clear resin into the space it left, then curing it hard. Done properly it restores most of the strength to that spot and stops the damage spreading. It does not make the mark vanish completely, and any shop promising invisibility is overselling it.
Three things decide whether your damage is a candidate: how big it is, where it sits, and how deep it went.
The rough industry line is a chip up to about the size of a quarter, or a crack up to roughly six inches. Beyond that the resin cannot carry enough load across the break for the repair to be trustworthy.
Damage sitting squarely in front of the driver is treated differently even when it is small, because a cured repair leaves slight distortion. Damage within a couple of inches of the edge is also a problem, since that is where the glass carries the most stress.
A windshield is two sheets of glass with a plastic layer between them. If the impact only broke the outer sheet, we can repair it. If it went through to the inner layer, the glass has to be replaced.
Put a piece of clear tape over a fresh chip until your appointment. It keeps dust and moisture out of the break, and a clean break takes resin far better than one packed with road grit.
Glass expands when it heats and contracts when it cools. A windshield sitting in an uncovered parking lot in July can reach well above the air temperature, and then you start the car and put cold air directly onto the inside surface. The two surfaces move at different rates and every bit of that stress concentrates at the tip of an existing chip.
That is the mechanism behind the crack people find one morning and swear was not there the night before. It was there. It was a chip, and the temperature swing walked it across the glass.
Many comprehensive policies cover chip repair with no deductible, because insurers would much rather pay for a repair than a replacement later. We check your coverage before we start, and if it is covered you will not pay us anything.
If the damage turns out to be past repair once we look at it, we tell you on the spot and quote the replacement instead. You are never charged for a repair attempt that should not have been made.
A clear picture of the chip and where it sits tells us in seconds whether it is repairable.
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