[Chris Burkard]

A similar thing happened to me on my 29. I went to the boat one day and found the port side glass shattered into pieces. I suspect a rock was shot out of a lawnmower from a nearby house. Look very closely at yours, I could actually find the point of impact.

Mine was a straight piece however, the curved will be much more of a PITA. Tiara helped me get a new window. I possibly could have had a local glass shop help but I wanted to make sure the color was right.

The price was around $700 + shipping. Again this was a much smaller and straight piece of glass. My deductible is 1K so it wasn't worth going that route.

Changing it wasn't hard, but it took some time to bed it properly and seal it.

Good luck with yours.

A flat piece of safety glass is no problem. They can simply cut to fit. A curved piece of glass requires exact patterning of the vessel, then a special mold has to built. Then the glass has to be laminated in stages using the new mold. It must be done to exact specifications so that it fits properly and the laminating process must be done properly so that there is not significant distortion in the curved section.

The old 1990s Tiara 4300 Open had curved corner sections in the windshield. The flat sections of the windshield (sides & center opening section) were made from safety glass and the curved corners were made from Acrylic or Lexan. As the boat aged, you could see a slight color difference in the corners as the glass and Lexan discolored differently over time. I'm sure that Tiara used Lexan on the curved corners because of cost. Custom curved glass is expensive. Car windshields are different. When a glass company builds a mold for a car windshield, it is used to make 10s of thousands of parts (or hundreds of thousands of parts) and the cost of the mold can be spread across all of those parts. Then when the car goes out of production, the company still continues to manufacture those windshields for replacement parts. How many 52 Tiaras were ever produced? I think about 50 boats were built. When the boat went out of production, the glass company discarded the molds, because storing a large glass mold like that is expensive and how many future parts can they hope to make from those molds? Not very many is my guess. I'm sure there is a small glass company that could make one for less, but finding that company is going to be quite a search. Just my $.02!