1. Removing the hard water...
1. Removing the hard water spot from the glass took some work but they came off in the end.
During the initial clean up of my S-10 I noticed that all the glass was covered in hard water spots. None of the normal glass cleaners in my detailing arsenal would even make a dent to these crusty boogers. I even tried to scrape them off with a single edge razor blade, with no luck. I have heard you can use a distilled white vinegar and water solution to get them off but I'm not sure what that might do to my paint if it got on there. Instead of taking a chance and messing up my paint I decided to use something a little more aggressive than glass cleaner but something that would still be safe on paint, Meguiar's Medium-Cut Cleaner. I had no idea if it would scratch my glass, but if it did I could get one from the junkyard. Well I didn't have to got to the boneyard after all because the compound worked and the spots and gone.
WHAT IS A HARD WATER SPOT?
Hard water has microscopic particles of stuff like calcium, lime and iron. When the water evaporates back into the air those little things stay behind and create a spot. The longer they stay on the glass, the more difficult they are to remove.
Meguiar's Inc.,
17991 Mitchell South
Irvine, CA 92614
(800) 347-5700
www.meguiars.com
Stoner Inc.,
1070 Robert Fulton Hwy
Quarryville, PA 17566
(800) 227-5538
www.stonersolutions.com
 2. This is what a nasty case...  2. This is what a nasty case of hard water spots look like. These will even worse once the windows get tinted. |  3. Here's the stuff I used...  3. Here's the stuff I used to get the spots off, Meguiar's Medium-Cut Cleaner, Stoner's Invisible Glass cleaner and two rags. |  4. I taped off the rubber...  4. I taped off the rubber seals along the window opening to keep it from getting stained by the compound. I don't want to spend a bunch of time cleaning the glass and then have to scrub the rubbers. |
 5. After shaking the bottle...  5. After shaking the bottle of the cleaner I put a liberal amount on a terry cloth towel. |  6. Since I had no idea how...  6. Since I had no idea how hard to scrub I took it slow. Come to find out it's like polishing a billet wheel. |  7. As I scrubbed I could see...  7. As I scrubbed I could see the spots going away so once they were all gone from my little test area I used the Invisible Glass to clean off the excess compound. |
 8. As you can see there are...  8. As you can see there are gone. There are a few small scratches in the glass that I thought came from the compound so I lightened up on the pressure just a bit and everything went fine from there. It took me about an hour to do all the glass on the truck with these steps. Now I'm ready for tint. | | |