John,
I know it’s a few months since your posting relating to the windscreen of your 409 but having recently had my windscreen replaced on my 410, I thought I would give you and any member of the forum who may be interested, a summary of my experience.
My existing windscreen was showing signs of delamination on both sides, the rubber seals had hardened and were starting to leak, so I purchased a new front windscreen and seals for both the front and rear glass.
I have a friend who is a professional auto glass fitter (over 40 years experience) and the obvious choice was to use him. Everything was arranged and we set to. We had great difficulty from the start, nothing was going well.
In desperation I phoned SLJ for advice which they gave me and also the name of the company they use, who are White Horse Windscreens, I phoned them and spoke to Clive Bryant. Clive gave both my glass fitter and myself the benefit of his experience over the phone but to no avail, we weren’t able to progress. After 4 hours we abandoned the job.
The following morning, I phoned Clive again and subsequently made arrangements for him to fit my new windscreen and replace the seals on the rear window.
Bearing in mind at this point I had no windscreen in my car and White Horse Windscreens were a 4.5hour drive from where I live. The Bristol had to be sheeted up and trailered down to Wiltshire.
I was able to watch Clive get to work and saw firsthand how to fit a windscreen into a Bristol 410, in my view it’s all down to a lot of experience and technique. It’s most definitely not something I would advise any Bristol owner to attempt or farm out to either a local or multi national glass fitting company. It is a very specialised job and White Horse are the people to use, they are, in my opinion excellent and their prices are very reasonable.
Brian
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