Broken Glass Cooktop Repair for Dummies

Glass cooktop

According to the research staff, most of the DotD candidates they find seem to have started out wanting to be useful, and then gotten greedy. That's probably why so many of them start writing in their field of expertise (assuming they have one) and then branch out into topics about which they know darned near nothing. take, for instance, eHowian Melanie Fleury, who penned the pretty useless post "How to Fix a Cracked Glass Cook Top" (now available at SFGate.com, thanks to Leaf Group's nichemania).

You know Fleury's in over her head from sentence number one... well, from her introduction, actually:

"Stoves with glass cook tops are popular accents in homes with high-end appliances. These cook tops are highly efficient and simple to clean. However, they are also fragile and easy to break. When a glass cook top breaks, it can be replaced so that the stove can be utilized."

What's wrong with that, you ask? Easy:

Glass cooktops aren't "fragile and easy to break," which is redundant to begin with. They're made of thick tempered glass that can take much more abuse than the average window.  Wait a minute, no one asked about a stove – they asked about a cooktop! Moving right along, Melanie gives some rudimentary instructions for removing the glass surface from an electric range. Unfortunately, they're pretty bad even for that task... we're talking instructions like "Unscrew your cook top from the stove. There are typically four screws, one in each corner. Prop up the frame and disconnect the wires that are leading to the cook top. Be very careful not to shatter the glass by applying too much pressure as you unscrew. Gently pull the cook top out of the frame."

Unfortunately, Leaf didn't move Fleury's list of sources to Hunker, so we couldn't figure out what stove repair manual she was trying to reword. That makes no difference, however, because those instructions are downright useless! No stove has four screws holding on a glass top, and the instruction about being "careful not to shatter the glass by applying too much pressure as you unscrew" is, to put it bluntly, dirt stupid. Oh, yeah, and what are those "wires that are leading to the cook top" supposed to be for?
In the first place, Fleury doesn't answer the implied question of how to fix a crack in the glass (you can't, but she didn't say that). Second, Fleury confuses a cooktop with the top of a stove -- they're not the same thing. And third, those instructions pretty much make no sense (not to mention that most people can't "unplug [the] stove"!) If you wondered why Melanie is our Dumbass of the Day, well, now you know.

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