The Name's Bond...

... Windscreen Bond, and I'm an utter, utter pain in the dick.

Having tried to remove bonded-in windscreens before and only ever succeeded in cracking them, a couple of folks on the HRG Faecebook page pointed me towards some guff you could buy from Screwfix that'd work to dissolve the stuff. A trip to Screwfix, and five minutes and £3.99 later, I have a bottle of 'No Nonsense' Sealant Remover. Whether this is the stuff I needed or not I don't know, but from my description it's all the monosyllabic acne-ridden knuckle-fuckers behind the counter could find that matched my - admittedly vague - description of what I was after.

I tried it on the rear screen of a Fox Mustang notch that had suffered from a previous owner's "oh-shit-my-carpet's-wet-I'd-better-go-round-all-my-windows-with-Sikaflex" attitude, so I tried to scrape away as much excess as I could before starting. The bottle comes with a brush built into the cap, like Kurust (or, as it should be called, Doesn't Kurust But Turns It A Slightly More Attractive Colour Before Creating Horrible Blue Streaks The First Time It Rains), and the product itself is like a gel, so I painted it around the rear screen bond.

I don't know what I was expecting - maybe somebody like Barry Scott to shout, 'Bang! And the Sikaflex is gone!' - but what it mainly did, after 15 minutes, is make the surface of the bead of sealant soft and gooey. Whereupon the now-nearly-liquid layer of Sikaflex goes everywhere. All over the paintwork, all over the glass, all over me, everywhere. So a second coat of solvent went on. After another 15 minutes, the Sikaflex still hadn't magically disappeared, but there was slightly less of it and what remained was a bit softer, so out came the old hook-and-rope windscreen remover. The screen came out pretty easily and ... in one piece! Result!

This was almost a week ago. I still have not succeeded in completely scrubbing all the dissolved Sikaflex off my hands. The patches of the damn stuff on the overalls I was wearing have since set solid. The lumps of it that I scraped off have got stuck in the treads of my boots so that when I'm outside I build up an accretion of gravel and pebbles that stick to it, but when I'm indoors I manage to leave little tarry smudges on the floor. And now I have a Fox Mustang notch rear windscreen that nobody wants and I have nowhere to store. Yet, somehow, the whole operation still feels like it was a success...

Eugene