"TMS320" wrote in message
...

"JNugent" wrote in message
More so today than in the past. I can remember that cars as late as the
1980s had windscreens which would shatter into an almost-opaque network
of
thousands of tiny pieces if struck hard enough. Today, they merely chip
in the same circumstances, and the chip is often repairable.

What kind of antique were you driving in the 1980's? Laminated was common
(certainly on cars made in foreign lands) from the late 60's (if not
earlier).

Toughened, as opposed to laminated, windscreens were common into the 1980s
in the UK. My dad's 1970s Hillman Hunters had them; my 1980 and 1985 Renault
5s had them. I can't remember whether my 1988 VW Golf did. My 1993 Golf
certainly didn't, although the sunroof did - I remember going out to my car,
on the flightpath from Heathrow, one morning and finding a football size
hole in the sunroof, a strange chemical smell, and loads of glass pea-gravel
and a damp patch on the seat: I think a ball of iced chemical toilet liquid
had dropped from an aircraft :-(

Toughened glass is easy to detect if you wear polarising sunglasses because
you see a spotty coloured pattern (like leopard skin) over most of the
windscreen. It breaks into small pebbles of glass, whereas laminated glass
sometimes just chips or cracks, and if an object penetrates it, you get a
large depression with glass sticking to the plastic lamination.