Tint Car Windows - Installing the Window Film

Laurence Streidel: Hi! My name is Laurence Streidel. I am the owner of Winners Window Tint here in Rockville, Maryland. In this segment of Tint Your Ride, I am going to show you how to apply window film to the actual glass. First step is to release the liner on the actual film. You dont want to take it all the way off, you want to leave it about a little bit more than half way down, want to spread the adhesive of the film itself. All this excess down below, you just want to trim it off. Its one of the first steps before we actually apply the film. The next thing we are going to do is transfer the film on to the glass. When transferring the film on to the glass itself, make sure that the first thing you want to do is roll it down your window about half an inch, but at the very top edge, you also want to leave about a 1/16th of an inch of gap at the very top. You will make sure that your left and right-hand sides of your actual film is completely covered and with no lay caps.

Well, now that our film is in place, we can go ahead and grab our water bottle, spray the actual film itself, take out our Turbo Squeegee and squeegee out all of the excess moisture. With overlapping strokes, start from the middle and work your way from the right side, squeegeeing to your left. Take you time, its not a race. This is important; you really want to get a lot of this moisture out, especially if its cold outside. Once you have actually completed this portion of it, you will want to go into what we call bumping. Take your hard card; wrap it in a paper towel. With this, you will want to have overlapping strokes, going towards the top edge of your window. What this does is it absorbs all of the water thats being pushed out before it actually gets rolled up into the well of the window, most important. You may even want to use this as well to squeegee out some of the excess water from the left to the right of the actual window film. The next step we are going to do is we are going to go ahead and roll this window up. In this part, you will want to lift your window film up because in the next step, we are actually going to start to tuck the actual window film under the rubber gasket. So the first thing you will want to do is go ahead and spray it under the actual window film. The reason being is that, once we have rolled the window up, a lot of dirt and debris collect at the bottom of the window and get risen up when the glass is up in the well. So with your squeegee, just take your time squeegee out the actual water. Reapply your soap and water solution.

Once thats completed, go ahead and pull off your release liner, take your time with it. Now thats been released, you can lift your film up, spray a few drops of water under the film and lets go ahead and tuck it under the actual gasket. Your hard card also comes in really handy at this point. Use your hard card to tuck behind the rubber edge, pull back on the rubber gasket and with your other free hand, slowly pull back in the gasket and push down the existing film. Take your time with this. Some gaskets are a little bit tighter than others.

Now that we have it tucked, we are going to go ahead and use our Turbo Squeegee, squeegee up all the excess moisture thats left. As you are squeegeeing, just make sure you are going from middle to bottom as well as left to right, right to left, whichever youd prefer. I also want to add a little bit more of your soap and water solution; it really helps to push a lot of water. It really helps you really make your squeegee move a lot faster.

With that said, well now that we have completed our first roll-down window, we are going to move on to show you how to heat shrink over your window.