Tape it, today
Clear packing tape over the damage on the outside. It keeps dirt and water out of the break, which is the single biggest factor in whether a repair later comes out clean or cloudy. It does not stop the crack growing, but it protects your option to repair rather than replace.
Do not use duct tape — the adhesive bakes on and is worse to remove than the dirt would have been.
Stop shocking it with temperature
- Do not aim the defroster at full heat at a cold, cracked windshield. This is the classic winter mistake and it runs cracks across entire windshields. Warm the cabin gradually.
- Do not blast cold air conditioning at a windshield that has been baking in the sun. Same failure, opposite direction — and this is the Sacramento version.
- Park in shade where you can, or use a sunshade. A windshield in the open on a valley afternoon swings enormously in temperature between 3pm and 9pm, and every swing works the crack.
Stop flexing it
The body of a car twists, and the windshield twists with it. Rough roads, speed bumps taken at an angle, potholes and slamming doors all put a shear load across the glass.
Take the smooth route for a few days, go slowly over the rough parts, and close doors gently — with a window cracked open, so the pressure spike has somewhere to go.
What does not work
Superglue, clear nail polish and the resin kits sold in auto parts stores. The store kits are not entirely useless on a small, fresh, clean chip, but they inject at low pressure and cannot pull the air out of the break first, so the resin does not reach the tips of the break — which is exactly where a crack grows from.
Worse, once a store kit has half-filled a break with cured resin, a professional repair on that chip becomes much harder and often impossible. A $15 kit can turn a $50 repair into a windshield replacement. If the chip is worth fixing, have it done properly.
Need this done rather than explained? There is no shop to drive to. We come to wherever your car already is — your driveway, your workplace car park, an apartment lot, or the side of the road it stopped on — anywhere in greater Sacramento, with no call-out fee and no mileage charge. Give us the year, make and model and you will have a firm price before the call ends.