One of the most annoying issues on the road trip home with Louie the 2002tii was the nearly catastrophic level of water intrusion through the windshield gasket. Although the windshield is in remarkably good condition—this is one of the reasons that I think the car has not 139,000 miles on it but 39,000 miles—the car must’ve sat outside in the sun for a long period, because the windshield gasket was laughably hardened and shrunken, causing it to leak like the proverbial screen door on a submarine during my thousand-mile trek home from Louisville.

    Louie and I survived the trip home, but it took nearly a week for the rugs and the foam beneath them to fully dry out, even with a fan running.

    We all choose what automotive work we do ourselves versus what we’re willing to pay a professional to do. Some of these choices are borne on the back of hard experience (e.g., “Well, that sucked; I’ll never do that myself again!”), whereas others are based on little more than vague inferences from things we’ve heard or read.

    The task of windshield installation and gasket replacement was the latter for me. I’d never done it, and really had little desire to. Plus I’d read that there’s a good deal of shoving and pushing involved, and with the remarkably unpitted condition of Louie’s glass, I didn’t want to risk cracking it. Finally, I’ve read that the $50 Uroparts windshield gaskets fit horribly, and that you should buy an OEM gasket for more like $100, but that even those have fitment issues. It seemed like one of those times where paying a pro was a slam-dunk.

    I asked my friend Lindsey Brown, shop foreman of the Little Foreign Car Garage in Waltham, whom they use. “I’ve done some cars myself,” said Lindsey, “but mostly we use Don Cotton at the Village Glassmith in Needham. He does it on-site in our shop. He’d probably come right to your house.”

    I called Don and explained my situation of having a near-perfect windshield with a hardened, shrunken gasket that probably needed nuclear weapons or a chisel (or both) to get it out. I told him that the car was in my garage in Newton, that I do most of my own work but didn’t really want to tackle this. I asked what he thought about OEM versus aftermarket gaskets, and whether he supplies the gasket or I should buy one. I probably went on for quite a bit, as anyone who’s met me knows I am wont to do.

    “Well,” said Don, “I’m now 63 years old, and what you’re describing sounds like a total pain in the ass. I think I’ll respectfully pass.”

    Burn.

    So I did what car people so often do: I thought, well, then, damn it, I’ll do it myself. I ordered a new OEM gasket and began preparing.

    First I had to get the old gasket out. The locking strip came out easily, because the gasket had shrunk away from it, although the strip was so brittle that it kept shattering into two-inch-long pieces. I had to keep digging it out with a screwdriver.

    Then I started in on the gasket itself. I tried using single-edge razor blades, but the gasket was so hard that I couldn’t grip the blade tightly enough to cut it. I slipped once and expected to see bloody horror, didn’t, and took it as my one chance to escape injury and switched to a utility knife with fresh blades in it. Still, even with the knife’s handle to grip and give leverage, the gasket was as tough as alligator skin. It was the kind of cutting that required pulling on the utility knife so hard that I was keenly aware that if the knife slipped, I could sever a tendon or hit an artery and bleed out on the floor of the garage. Initially I cut downward through the groove where the trim strip had been, and then inward where the gasket overlapped the windshield, but eventually I found that I could skip the downward cut and simply cut inward far enough to sever the gasket.

    After a harrowing hour or so, I’d cut all the way around the gasket, leaving all my tendons and arteries intact, and was able to lift the windshield onto a blanket on Louie’s hood. I supported the windshield in the middle with a strategically positioned rolled-up car cover.

    Next I had to get the rest of the old gasket out. At first this seemed easy, as big chunks simply pulled up out of the windshield frame and broke off.

    But when I looked closely, I saw that there were big, ugly rock-hard traces of the old gasket left. When I tried taking them off, I found that they were totally bonded with the paint. They laughed at my thumbnail. They jeered at my plastic scraper. A single-edge razor blade was sometimes effective, but it was very easy to wind up chipping the paint.

    I tried a Scotch-Brite pad, then a small abrasive wheel on the Dremel tool. These didn’t chip the paint, but the line between “all traces of rock-hard gasket are gone” and “you’re taking off paint” was razor-thin.

    Worse, when I pulled the old gasket off the A-pillars, there was visible corrosion underneath. This wasn’t surprising, considering that, given the shrunken condition of the gasket’s corners, water would’ve obviously been running down this channel.

    Lindsey was coming over Saturday morning to help me install the new gasket. I had sanding and prep work to do first, but he came by anyway to hang out. I consented, both for the camaraderie and because his Alpine White 1600 with Motorsport stripes, two-liter engine, 292-degree cam, and Webers substantially improves my property values.

    All kidding aside, I don’t do paint or bodywork, so I was glad to have Lindsey there for advice. The rust on the A-pillars appeared to be largely superficial. Lindsey recommended that I grind it off, put down a layer of Rustoleum Rust Reformer to convert any corrosion remaining in the pits, then prime and paint. We went to the hardware store, where I bought Rust Reformer, some primer, and a can of Rustoleum Hunter Green. There’s no pretending that this is a perfect match to Louie’s original Agave paint, much less Agave with patina, but for better or worse, Louie’s previous owner had already ground some rust blisters off the car and touched them up with Rustoleum Hunter Green, so at least I was being consistent.

    Over the next few days, I cleaned up the rust on the A-pillars with my Dremel tool and an abrasive wheel, getting it bright and shiny except for a few pits. I then laid down the Rust Reformer, followed by priming and painting. It looks horrible in the photos below, but I was hopeful that most of the work would be covered up when the new windshield gasket was set in place.

    As I awaited G-day, I tried to get smart about windshield installation. You can read about the “rope trick,” in which you put the new gasket around the windshield, thread a length of thin rope in the groove in the gasket that the windshield frame is supposed to sit in, lubricate the gasket, set the windshield and gasket in the windshield frame, then pull the rope to “flip the lip” of the gasket so it’s now on the inside surface of the frame, and Bob’s your uncle. There’s even a great three-part video here on YouTube of our own Mike Self and others installing a windshield into a 2002 at the Vintage in 2009. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2a7LA22qX4).

    Having said that, there’s a classic Monty Python routine called “How To Do It” where a television emcee says, “This week on How To Do it, we’re going to show you how to play the flute. Well, you blow in one end and move your fingers up and down the outside.” This has resonated with me my entire life—so many things sound easy, but the devil is in the details. Over the next week, if I heard one more person say, “Oh, windshield installation? You just need to do the rope trick,” I would’ve punched them in the mouth.

    So let’s attack this in stages. First I’ll tell you what I read, then I’ll tell you what I did—and what happened.

    Like windshields on most cars, the 2002 windshield gasket has a lock strip in it. There’s a question of whether to put the lock strip in the gasket before or after the windshield is installed. The 2002 factory manual describes putting the gasket on the windshield, inserting the lock strip in the gasket, then “roping in” the windshield and gasket, starting at the bottom.

    But on bmw2002faq, opinion seemed to be divided on when to insert the lock strip. It seemed to be a “You can pay me now or pay me later” thing. That is, it’s easier to insert the lock strip first—but that makes it more difficult to get the windshield seated in the frame. In contrast, roping in the windshield and getting it seated is easier without the lock strip in, but then it’s more difficult to insert the lock strip once the gasket is compressed between the windshield and the frame. Several folks advised that it’s best to install the windshield and gasket without the strip in it, then wait until a hot day and leave the car out in the sun for an hour to get the gasket pliant and install the strip. And the advice was not to buy a $10 strip-insertion tool, and instead to spring for the $25 Aegis Equalizer PA1328 tool that has rollers, allowing you to lean onto the gasket and zip the strip in. Figuring that I wasn’t paying for installation, I sprang for the tool.

    Finally, there’s the issue of lubrication. You want to lube the groove that the rope is in so that the rope will cleanly and easily slide out when you pull it, but you also want to lubricate the “lip that flips” so that it won’t hang up on the windshield frame, as well as any part of the gasket that faces the windshield frame, so you’ll be able to shove the windshield and gasket around and align it properly. It’s confusing, because when you look at a windshield gasket, there are multiple lips and folds. Basically you want to lubricate everything that isn’t the front-most and rear-most face of the gasket.

    Some Facebook friends recommended using GoJo hand-cleaner to lubricate the gasket (the creamy lanolin-based stuff, not the gritty pumice-based formulation). Others recommended Dawn dishwashing liquid. Then I read in other places that you shouldn’t use either of these because they contain oil that can degrade the gasket over time. Glass pros appear to recommend using foaming glass cleaner, as it’s inert with the rubber gasket, but DIYers cautioned that it dries too quickly.

    Lindsey was willing and eager to come back and help me install the windshield, but I got impatient. I swapped messages with my friend Chris Roberts, who I knew had installed several windshields himself. He advised using GoJo as a lubricant, positioning the two ropes near one of the corners of the windshield, pulling one rope to first seat the bottom edge, then pulling the other and seating both lower corners together, and then working your way up.

    So I did.

    It was a disaster.

    First, there’s the issue of the clips. At some point, BMW outfitted the windshield frame with big long, wide toothed clips to bite into the gasket. The very early cars don’t have them, but apparently by 1972 they did. The combination of the size of the clip and the irregularity of the teeth makes it easy for the lip of the gasket to get snagged and not flip, regardless of the fact that you did the rope trick. There are posts on 2002faq that say, “Just remove the clips,” but I am hesitant to second-guess the engineers who designed the car, and certainly don’t do so on a whim.

    Second, at the base of the windshield frame, there is only perhaps a quarter inch of space between the toothed clip and the front edge of the dashboard. I stared and stared at this and wondered how the gasket was going to fit in there. This turned out to be a major issue.

    In this first attempt, I maneuvered the windshield into place, which in and of itself is non-trivial, as it’s big and awkward and the gasket is heavily lubricated; think about trying to slide a baby walrus covered in Vaseline into a walrus-shaped hole and you’ll get the general idea. I then pulled the first rope out along the bottom edge, but only about half the length of the lip flipped. Using my finger to lift the gasket, a flashlight to see, and a plastic pry tool, I tried to grab and flip the rest of the lip around that toothed clip, but it was sheer hell. I eventually made a lip-flipping tool by taking a small Allen key and holding it with Vise Grips.

    Even with the makeshift tool, due to the small amount of clearance and the gasket lip catching the wrong way on the toothed surface of the clip, it took me an hour to get the lower lip flipped and the base of the windshield seated.

    Maire Anne then texted me that dinner was ready. I made a fatal error: I went inside. My neck and upper body were sore. I relished the break. We had a lovely relaxing meal on the sofa.

    But when I went back to the garage, I started to pull the ropes up the A-pillars and noticed that the windshield was shifted slightly to one side. I tried resetting it, but found that during the hour I’d paused for dinner, the GoJo had lost its lubricating properties. I shoved, but the windshield would not budge. Unbeknownst to me, I had a window of opportunity, and had blown it.

    Crap.

    I texted Chris Roberts. He recommended that I pull the windshield and gasket out and simply try again. I told him that seating the bottom was hell the first time, and I wasn’t anxious for a rematch. Chris advised that there wasn’t much alternative, softening this news with the opinion that it’s often easier the second time due to the gasket having acquired some memory.

    Out the windshield came. Unfortunately, as I was putting the rope back into the grove, I could see that my Allen key lip-flipping tool had made three small tears on the inside part of the lower lip of my brand-new OEM hundred-dollar gasket. Fortunately, the tears were on the inner-most part of the lip, which in theory is a grabbing surface, not a sealing surface.

    This time I used enough GoJo to stuff a walrus down a toilet. I set the windshield back into place, pulled the rope, and found that, again, about half the length of the lower lip didn’t flip. I spent half an hour trying to use the Vise-Allen key tool to flip the lip (and no, it wasn’t any easier the second time), decided that I didn’t want to risk the lube drying up and that I could reach in and flip the bottom lip after the windshield was in the frame, and began pulling the ropes up the A-pillars—when the base of the windshield popped out and the entire lubricated rubbery, glassy mess began sliding onto Louie’s hood like a walrus galumphing down into the water.

    To quote Krieger in Archer, “No no no no NO!”

    In truth, the glass probably wasn’t in any danger; I had a blanket on the hood. But it was one of those moments where, when circumstances scream at you stop, you’re an idiot if you don’t stop. I am many things, but I try not to be an idiot.

    (Next week, Battle Number Two of the windshield wars.)—Rob Siegel

    Rob’s first book, Memoirs of a Hack Mechanic, and his new book, The Hack Mechanic Guide to European Automotive Electrical Systems, are available through Bentley Publishers, Amazon, ECS Tuning, and Bavarian Autosport—or you can get personally inscribed copies through Rob’s website: www.robsiegel.com And stay tuned for Rob’s upcoming book, Ran When Parked: How I Resurrected A Decade-Dead 1972 BMW 2002tii And Road-Tripped It A Thousand Miles Back Home—And How You Can, Too.