Tint Car Windows - Trimming Edges and Heat Shrinking

Laurence Streidel: Hi! My name is Laurence Streidel. I am owner of Winners Window Tint here in Rockville, Maryland. In this segment of Tint Your Ride, I am going to show you how to trim off some of your excess film and trim off some of your corners. Okay, let's get started. Start with the right side and let's get a nice straight line. You will need your hard card as your straight edge as well. Now let's get started on the left side. Place your hard card, nice in level with the existing cut that you have and just gently cut across the glass. Put just adequate amount of pressure, so that you don't cut the actual glass of the car. In this corner, here you want to round out your edges. From here on the upper right hand corner, you just want to round out your edge. Nice and clean.

Well, now that we have all of our edges trimmed and all of the excess film gone, we can go into our next stage, where we will actually heat shrink the window film. First item you will need is a heat gun. I use a Milwaukee heat gun. Now with your hard card, you will want to anchor down the existing film by putting pressure on it from the top-middle, along the left and right hand sides. You are going to be creating what is called, in the industry, as fingers.

These fingers that we create actually can be problematic, if we don't do this. So with your heat gun that we have, we are actually going to be wet heating the actual film. Notice how the film itself begins to curl, it create a little slight excess in the actual film. You will want to run your heat gun over those. Take your time with this and try to apply just an even amount of heat to each area. If you don't, it can burn and melt the film itself.

Now that we have just about 2 or 3 more, you will want to do this to every window that you work on. It really saves a lot of time and makes the installation a lot cleaner. Well, now that we have completed the heat shrinking process to our driver window, in the next segment, I am going to show you how to clean and prepare and install this window film.