Howdy, new Mini owner with a simple and trivial question

[het3]

This is my first post, as I've had a Mini Cooper S for about five days now. It didn't take long for me to become a fanatic about this car. Black body, black roof, 17" wheels, nice supercharger hum, it's about perfect.

But it's lightly used (3k miles) and comes from out of state. It has an out of state inspection sticker in the windshield, and apparently they used some super-epoxy adhesive to put this sticker on.

How scratchable is safety glass? Can something like lighter fliud be used to remove the sticker without harming the integrity of the glass, or clouding it, or something? Does anyone have any clues how I could get this sticker off my window? Warm water is not going to do it.

[friedduck]

Het3,

Congrats on the mini! just use a flat razor blade and as long as you're not trying to dig a corner of the blade in you'll be fine. The emissions guys use these all the time (in fact, the dealer used one to remove my original invoice sticker.)

Wd-40 or goof-off or equiv. to get any remaining goop off.

Jeff

[jasemini]

You should be right to simply scrape it off with a paint scraper. Safety Glass???? If the glass has a tint film on it, yes you would definately scratch it, but I'm not sure how the US version of safety glass works, is the glass coated in a film of some sort? If so it would have to be quite tough wouldn't it? As for removing it with a fluid of some sort, try that stuff that's based on citrus extract. In Australia it's it's called GOO REMOVER and it's got an Orange on the front of the bottle and obviously it's made from Citric Oil of some form, it works quite well but avoid plastics, I made quite a mess of a CD case trying to remove the adhesive label of the front once. But glass is OK.

Cheers

Jase

[het3]

Thanks for the replies: that was fast.

Yeah, auto safety glass has different layers: glass, polyvinyl butyral or another plastic. As I recall, some windshields can have a non-glass layer as the inside surface of the windshield, and I was just wondering if anyone here had had any issues with the windshield on the Mini. If you can scrape it with a razor, it's probably glass on the inside surface.

And thanks for the congratulations. Man, this car is just stupendous, I'm having too much fun. Put about 200 miles on it this weekend, just zipping around. I'm now thinking about what I want to add to the car. I'm thinking a chrome grille in front would look great.

[Mike Clarke]

Welcome to MINI2, how about some pics of the all black S
It's a tradition on MINI2
Enjoy the car
Mike

[BruceK]

I'd recommend use of a razor blade, and then attempt to use Windex or similar glass cleaner to remove the residue first, before you break out the really harsh stuff.

[GTmini]

Glad this topic came up...I've got a big Texas inspection sticker that I'll also need to remove once my plates get here. I just hope that I don't crack the windshield trying to remove it (Ah, I laugh now until it finally happens to me)

If the standard razor blade trick works out without any scratches, it would be great to hear about it when you're done.

[very mini]

I bought Goof Off (from your local hardware store, in the painting section) to take the latex WArning stickers off the sun visors. It says it cleans glass too, I would HIGHLY recommend it! It doesn't smell much either!