Jim Stabe
Well-known member
I'm showing off - guilty as charged! I AM kind of proud of the way it turned out though. So why build a windshield when the car came from the factory with a perfectly good one that looks good as well? The stock one won't go all the way across the car which is 11 1/2" wider now than when it started life.
I started by looking for a windshield glass that was wide enough to span the new width of the car that also had quite a bit of curvature to match the stock windshield's curvature. Until you go out and actually look for something like that you don't realize that most cars aren't that wide and those that are have fairly flat contours. What I finally ended up with is a '67 Impala glass, it is wide enough and has a fair amount of curvature. Hard to believe I need a windshield out of a land yacht like that to get enough width. The next thing I did was make a hardboard template of the windshield by soaking the board overnight in the pool and then weighting it in place on the concave side of the glass to let it dry in the shape of the glass. When it was dry I glued in some wood supports so it would retain its shape and trimmed it to the shape of the windshield. I'm going to avoid the dark tint strip at the top of the windshield when I cut out the final shape. Now I had something I could work with and not worry about breaking the glass. I played with shape and layback angle using masking tape until I was happy with the look and then I cut the template to the final glass shape.
With the shape of the glass determined I started on the frame. The channel the glass sits in is 3/4 x 3/4 x 1/8" aluminum "C" channel and the side posts are made from much modified MG Midget windshield posts. I bent the channel by filling the 1/2" wide cavity with two strips of 1/4" hardboard to keep the sides from collapsing and then roll forming the contour with flat rollers in my ring roller. The channel has to bend in both planes so it took a couple hours to get the contour of each piece right.
I ran out of room for pictures so I'll continue this in another post.
http://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?p=2325800#post2325800
I started by looking for a windshield glass that was wide enough to span the new width of the car that also had quite a bit of curvature to match the stock windshield's curvature. Until you go out and actually look for something like that you don't realize that most cars aren't that wide and those that are have fairly flat contours. What I finally ended up with is a '67 Impala glass, it is wide enough and has a fair amount of curvature. Hard to believe I need a windshield out of a land yacht like that to get enough width. The next thing I did was make a hardboard template of the windshield by soaking the board overnight in the pool and then weighting it in place on the concave side of the glass to let it dry in the shape of the glass. When it was dry I glued in some wood supports so it would retain its shape and trimmed it to the shape of the windshield. I'm going to avoid the dark tint strip at the top of the windshield when I cut out the final shape. Now I had something I could work with and not worry about breaking the glass. I played with shape and layback angle using masking tape until I was happy with the look and then I cut the template to the final glass shape.
With the shape of the glass determined I started on the frame. The channel the glass sits in is 3/4 x 3/4 x 1/8" aluminum "C" channel and the side posts are made from much modified MG Midget windshield posts. I bent the channel by filling the 1/2" wide cavity with two strips of 1/4" hardboard to keep the sides from collapsing and then roll forming the contour with flat rollers in my ring roller. The channel has to bend in both planes so it took a couple hours to get the contour of each piece right.
I ran out of room for pictures so I'll continue this in another post.
http://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?p=2325800#post2325800
Last edited: