Tint Car Windows - Heat Shrinking the Rear Window

Laurence Streidel: Hi! My name is Laurence Streidel. I am the owner of Winners Window Tint, Rockville, Maryland. In todays segment of Tint Your Ride, I am going to show you how to apply and dry shrink a rear window. First two items that you need is your water bottle and a bounty fabric softener. Spray a little bit of soap and water on to it and go ahead and smear the window with the actual fabric softener. Get it on there really nicely. Take your time; make sure that you are getting all the areas of where the window film is actually going to be applied to on the exterior.

Well, now that the fabric softener has been dried for about five to six minutes, we are going to go ahead and apply our rear window film. As we are applying the actual window film to the back glass, we want to make sure that all of our areas are covered. All the contours of the rear window are covered as well. Now the next thing you want to do is take your hard card and proceed with the H-pattern. You start from the middle of the actual glass and work upward and then downward. From there, you want to start again from the middle of the glass, grab a corner of your film, pull it towards you and push with your squeegee. Follow the lines as the defroster lines of the curve of the glass; it really helps with making your life a lot easier. Do the same pattern here stretching with your left hand, following it with your hard card. So in total, you will have your H-pattern itself.

Once thats been done, we can move on and start the heat shrink process. You have got your trusty heat gun and you have got your hard card. With the actual heat itself, we are going to break down the first section. I am going to start with the lower bottom of the window. Notice, how the film begins to shrink starts to create a little squiggly lines. I want to keep that on an even heat and with your hard card, apply pressure, push down on the actual film.

You want to try to get it as flat as possible and you want to make sure that everything is perfectly even when you are actually shrinking the actual film. Notice that I am not going all the way to the bottom; I am just going from one end to the other and working my way at very even pattern. Same thing with the lower portions; you dont want to stay on one finger too long, you dont want it to crease and you certainly dont want to burn the film. This is what you are going to do to all four sides of the H-pattern.

Well, now that we have completed our heat shrink of the rear window, we are going to go ahead and I am going to show you how to prep and clean this rear glass, before we actually put the window film on.

First you are going to need, your soap and water solution. We are going to just spray an adequate amount on to the rear glass itself. Next tool you are going to need is our Blue Max Squeegee. This is a little bit more heavier of a squeegee, so its actually going to help push out a lot more water, lot more debris and its really designed for back windows.

When you are cleaning, start from the middle and work your way, follow the rear defroster lines; even and overlapping strokes, across and down. The next thing that you are going to need is, of course, your paper towel. You want to clean it away all of your edges around the glass because all that water you have pushed out contains a lot of dirt, a lot of contamination. We just want to wipe that out. Make sure we dont get any on the film or any on the glass. Now that you feel like youve adequately cleaned the window, we can move on to do in the actual installation.