rashbre central: a quick stop at the chip shop

Thursday 28 June 2018

a quick stop at the chip shop


Time to get another new windscreen for the car. This is the second replacement. The glass was hit by something small but high velocity a few days ago and made that horrible plink noise that told me there was some proper damage.

When I looked, there was a smallish half moon chip out of the central driver's zone, which made me suspect I'd need a whole replacement glass.

Again.

The last time this happened my car was off the road for about three weeks because the technicians didn't recalibrate all the wizardry of the sensors. There was an endless scrolling of dashboard error messages, bleeps and alarming red lights. The main dealer had to put it right whilst I drove around in a loan car.

This time they rightly said the car would need to go to somewhere that could do the ADAS calibration. Oh yes, that's the Advanced Driver Assist Systems calibrations.

My challenge was finding the special place they told me to visit for this refit. It wasn't at the main dealership and they certainly couldn't do it from home.

It turned out that the map address, Google and other guides all pointed to different places. The special phone number had been replaced as well.

Eventually I managed to get the mobile phone number of the technician who would do the work and he guided me in.

It was one of those industrial areas where there was every make of car showroom from Ferrari to Ford as well as Halfords, KwikFit, and onward to the units that replace gearboxes.

I eventually found the quite smart looking windscreen place. They estimated 90 minutes and I set off on foot to find a coffee shop. When I returned they had one of their mobile repair vans backstage as well as a bunch of other equipment to realign everything.

Sure enough, after around 90 minutes the new structurally significant windscreen was in place and all the sensors were behaving. And I can see through the windscreen in chip-free High Definition again.

No comments: