Hi, I had an OE screen fitted recently by Autoglass.
I watched the fitter and helped him where I could:
He tried with reasonable care to remove the scuttle panel which runs the width of the car but broke one of the pieces where the clips attach on the corner of the panel. He also broke a couple of the scuttle panel plastic rivet with screw insert type clips which hold the scuttle panel on the bulkhead side of the engine bay. There was nothing that could be done about this as the plastic clips and scuttle are nasty USA brittle plastic. He took enough care trying to get them off so I could not complain, it is just cack design and quality of plastic. He glued the corner of the scuttle and I got a couple of new rivet clips.
In terms of breaking the adhesive bond around my factory screen, he used a special tool where he basically ran thin metal wire around the outside of the screen, around the adhesive bead. He then poked one end of the wire through the adhesive bead at the bottom of the screen and attached it onto a machine he mounted on the screen inside the car. The machine had suckers and stuck onto the inside of the windscreen. He then wound a handle on the machine and it wound the wire onto a reel, which pulled the wire tight around the screen bead so the wire cut through the adhesive bead all round the screen. The idea of this machine is that it does not cause any damage to the car or metalwork around the windscreen like you now have!!
I talked to him quite a lot and he explained that Autoglass fitters are ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN to try and remove the screen and break the adhesive bead by ANY OTHER METHOD due to damage to customer vehicles and complaints. I remember he said they had taken all other tools they used years ago such to break the bead such as knives and cutting tools off of them to stop anyone using anything other than the machine.
I am sorry to hear of your troubles. IMO it is totally unacceptable for BMW to hand the car back with bits of scuttle busted and clips missing / busted. They should either rectified it so you would not have known or discussed it with you and arranged to rectify it at a later date. The damage to the metalwork, I can only assume they did not really know what they are doing and were amateur at screen changes. It looks indeed like they have used a stanley blade or something similar, which is not clever at all!! Why didn't they just source the screen and then outsource the fitting to a windscreen fitter? I can only assume the workshop manager got greedy and assigned the job to a workshop technician.
