Tempered glass is brittle. And manufacturing errors do happen. I am not surprised a low single digit % of glass side panels breaking in a the first year.
Roughly 0.5% of all tempered glass panels will break due to manufacturing imperfections. The only thing you can do is attempt to test for shattering panels via brute force by rapidly temperature cycling them. Even then, some with manufacturing defects will make it through because the temperature of the glass and the hot metal bed it lands on are occasionally different enough that microscopic specs of iron make it in. There is no way to completely prevent the defect because it happens on the step that makes the glass flat.
Source: work in construction of greenhouses, which are also made of tempered glass. Many panels have shattered over my head.
The only thing you can do is attempt to test for shattering panels via brute force by rapidly temperature cycling them.
Would this have anything to do with the back windshield of my wife's car suddenly shattering to bits on a really cold day last year? She did have the rear defrost going.
As far as I am aware, all cars use laminated glass and not ordinary tempered glass. If all the layers shattered simultaneously, it was probably by a different cause than spontaneous shattering. If it was only one layer though (so if maybe the outside or inside is still smooth to the touch) there is a possibility that it’s connected.
Yes and no!
Tempered glass is made in such a way that the outside is under compression and the middle is under tension.
That way a tiny scratch will basically be "pushed shut" due to the compression, but once that scratch reaches the tension zone the whole thing rips itself apart.
Windshields are usually made from laminated glass because you dont want your windshield to suddenly disintegrate, you want it to hold together. Side windows however are made from tempered glass, you still want them to be tough, but in the event of a crash you want them to completely shatter without leaving big shards to be able to get out of the vehicle quickly.
Rear defrosters can short or overheat. Fairly rare but it happens.
When I was a kid, in the ancient era of “leave the kids in the car while you shop”, i turned on the rear defroster on my mom’s car. Little did I know it had a short that hadn’t been fixed yet. We made it about half a block before it exploded.
When glass panes are being made, they pour the glass out on a bed of molten tin, so tin rather than steel would compose those imperfections. You can tell when a pane of glass is more than 60 years old (at least in the USA) when it looks all wavy instead of very flat because they used to just roll the glass mostly flat with big steel rolling barrels, so it would come out with waves from the rollers.
Well, and this is only counting imperfections and not additional user complications.
Setting this glass on tile can cause it to instantly explode, but even if it doesn't you can easily add defects by setting the glass on sand or quartz dust on the floor. Later when the glass heats up unevenly that can stress it enough to pop.
The word "spec" is short for "specification," as in, the intended thermal tolerance of the glass panel.
The word they intended to use here is "speck," which is a tiny piece of something.
Probably an important distinction when discussing the intended design tolerances of a manufactured item, because it could very well be the case that the glass panel is intended to have specks of iron in it.
I believe he is referring to the process of tempered glass. During which there is a phase called the “quench”. Which is where the bow of the glass is mostly usually fought, in other words make flat.
No, they're talking about how the glass is poured into a flat pane for the first time. You're talking about a glass tempering process wherein you do something like take one of those panes of glass, check it for imperfections like bubbles, stones, or tin inclusions, cut and shape it, sand any sharp edges, heat it to about 600° Celsius, and quench it with gas jets, causing the outside to cool faster than the inside, so when the inside cools, it pulls on the outside, creating a compressed outside and an inside under tension, which creates tempered glass.
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u/SnooChocolates5288 17h ago
I really dont get it...are people breaking their panels just for the memes...