Glass polishing question

Is it the roughness or the staining that is the problem?

Application of oven cleaner (perhaps including heating up in the oven) might be more effective than newspaper and ash.

Cheers

Dave R

The roughness. The glass surface is actually etched.

Tim

Definitely

I use stainless steel scoring wire pads and also fine grit wet and dry.

I never use wet newspaper and ash., That there is creosote - wood tar - and carbon.

It is made of sterner stuff.

Well what might work is a pan scourer and detergent followed up by a buffing mop and something like 'cif'.

As a suggestion, you can get kits for renewing the surface of car headlights. Might be worth a try.

My garage uses T-Cut for that, but then headlights are plastic.

Is it Ceramic Glass or Tempered Glass ?

This vid reviews the properties of each.

Paul

I've tried most of the methods but reverted to a glass scraper which gets the bulk of muck off. I finish off with a minimal spray of water & polish with a sheet of crumpled newspaper. My door is easily removable so I take it to the shed for cleaning but I have done it in situ.

T-cut is simply a fine abrasive. So is Cif, So is jewellers rouge or valve grinding compound.

In this case all assume that what's on the glass isn't as hard as the glass is, so wears away faster. Before the glass itself starts to abrade

Could use a buffing mop and various polishes made for metal as well

The polycarbonate of headlight lenses, is much softer than the hardness of glass.

But you are not trying to abrade the glass. Just abrade what is stuck to it.

Typically a carbon loaded tar...

Doesn't the amount of tar etc. depend very much on what is being burnt? I have only experience with a friend's wood burner which never requires more that a wet kitchen paper towel dipped in wood ash to clean the front glass. My friends only buy dried hardwood logs, and sparingly use softwood "morning sticks" to initially light the fire.

People with major problems with wood burners seem to be burning any old scrap wood or something that has been chopped down only weeks before and hasn't had time to lose moisture.

Well why not?

You can burn all sorts of s*it in a wood burner,.

For someone so smart, you seem unfamiliar with the term “etched”. Surface contamination on glass is easy to deal with. Polishing out etching is harder.

Tim

It also depends on the wood burner's design. Some attempt to have the incoming air form a 'curtain' against the glass, keeping the smoke (mostly) away from it.

Some designs are more successful that others.

Loading wood into the stove so that it touches the glass will of course defeat such measures.

If you can remove the glass, soak it in solvent like acetone to ‘soften’ the tar like muck and try a pan scrub.

In general the etching wont be very deep and wont actually stop light getting out

One of my replacement door glasses came pre etched already...

In all my years of wood burners I have never seen deep damage to the glass either. I suspect the OP has another issue.

The first step is to get the tar off and the carbon.