Glass Polishing

Polishing glass is not a quick job. You need the right tools,supplies, patience and a lot of time!

The photo below is of a piece of door glass for the 1965 Ford Econoline. It is quite difficult to take a photo that shows the clarity of the glass after it has been polished. You will have to take my word for the results. It looks pretty good! This single piece of glass took about two hours and about five dollars worth of supplies.


Eastwood sells a kit for polishing glass that includes the felt pad that you see below. It is made to be mounted in a drill. Eastwood claims that if you can't feel a scratch with a fingernail, it can be polished out with this kit.



Included in the kit is Rhodite Glass Polishing Compound. Rhodite is a natural occurring alloy of Gold and Rhodium. This Rhodite is extremely finely ground and mixed with water to make a paste.

Using the polishing pad in a drill is not fun. The drill is hard to hold and control because the pad wants to walk around the glass. The problem with the Eastwood pad is that it comes with a smooth shaft and I wanted to use my Porter-Cable Random Orbital Polisher.

I had a machinist, Josh W. of Kingsbury, NY create the adapter that is pictured below.


Now the Eastwood polishing pad can be used in my polisher. Much better!



Below is a 5-inch 3M Hookit pad that fits most polishing machines.


The loops on the pad and the hooks on the disks are similar to and work like Velcro.


3M makes films to polish glass. They range from coarse to fine. I used medium and fine to remove fine scratches in the glass. The main problem with polishing auto/truck glass is that except for the windshield, the glass is tempered. Tempered glass is extremely hard and it takes a lot of work and a lot of these films to get the desired results. It gets expensive.





While it is possible to polish glass including the curved glass in the corners of the pickup truck, it is a lot of work. Would it be better to send glass out to a shop to have it polished? Perhaps. But I am a glutton for punishment and there is a certain sense of pride attached to each and every part that I personally restore!

As always, you can see larger versions of these photos at my Flickr page. Just be sure to hit the "Back" button on your favorite browser to return to this blog.

Email me: Ron B.

Enjoy the Ride !