You walk down the street and you see a window with some kind of damage on it, and you know that there's a story to it, but you just can't figure it out.

Hi, I'm Troy McClure, you may remember me from threads such as "Classic", "The cashier broke my rules", "God damn", "JESUS", or polls like "Petition to get 66". Today I'm here to talk to you about windows.


The latter glass (annealed glass) is along with heat strengthed glass the only types that will be victim to stress cracks. Stress cracks happen due to thermal fluctuations, or edge damage. To differentiate you should look for a piece of glass that looks like a chip from the edge that's fallen off.

Next I'll tell you the difference between two similar glas planes in where damage has been inflicted, and what type it was.

If the glass has a more dense population of shards (still intact) at the impact points to the point where the glass looks white; it's because it had been hit by an object of fair size at an alright velocity.

If it looks like this It's caused by a small object stopping at the glass with a high velocity.

There are some glasses that have been hit by a big object, so how do they look? They look like your stereotypical image of broken glass, but with larger shards that are a bit curvy (intact) on the sides.