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Old 01-21-2020, 09:42 PM   #19
Agemegos
 
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Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
Default Re: [AtE] Early days, and vehicle wrecks

Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
Pretty sure the main point of laminated windows is that having an impact on the front window turn the front window into a bunch of tiny bits of glass means you suddenly have a bunch of gravel flying into your face while trying to deal with whatever else is going on, which is not going to help. You want the windshield to (a) continue blocking wind, (b) remain reasonably transparent, and (c) not send fragments flying into your face.
Your reasoning is persuasive. Nevertheless, when I was a boy most cars in Australia had tempered glass windscreens, which were called "safety glass" because they were safer than annealed (window) glass if you got thrown at then by a sudden deceleration*. To have your windscreen hit by a stone on a gravel road and suddenly cease to be transparent was a well-known hazard (though the pieces usually stayed in place unless the impactor was massive).

In 1988 I was in a Volvo 240 that was hit in the windscreen by a brick, the two doing 110 km/hr in opposite directions†. I was lucky that the car had a laminated windscreen; they were mandatory on new cars in Australia then, but had not been when the car was new.

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* My father, a country doctor, used to tell stories about stitching up lots of long parallel cuts on the faces of people who had gone face-first through annealed glass windscreens. It happened to my eldest brother once, and to the rocker Johnny O'Keefe.

† In that case the impact was so violent that the glass fragments of the middle third of the windscreen did not stick to the interlayer (which they usually do), and did spray through the passenger compartment. I got a lot of little slivers of glass stuck shallowly into my scalp and the backs of my hands and forearms, and a chip taken out of the left lens of my eyeglasses. I also got struck by the rearview mirror, which was torn out of its mount. But if that car had had a tempered-glass windscreen the brick would have taken my head clean off.
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