Profitable and useful: learning to tint a car with your own hands

Car window tinting is not the most difficult task and can be done by hand. Of course, any car repair shop will be happy to take on such work, but if you do it yourself, you can kill two birds with one stone - save a lot and do everything the way you want. Auto glass tinting is extremely popular. Even legislative restrictions do not interfere with it, which, in fact, prohibit darkening the view of the front of the car. Most factory car windows already have a slight tint, so if they are tinted with a film, they can go beyond the allowable 70% light transmission for the front semicircle of a car. But the rear part of the SDA and GOST does not limit, and here you can win back by completely protecting passengers and the cabin from the scorching sun.

Stages of work

There are many photos of cars, as well as videos showing how the cars look before and after the work has been done correctly. After looking at them, you will certainly want to do this with your own hands. Car window tinting is carried out in four stages:

• cleaning and washing of glued surfaces;
• cutting blanks from the film;
• tinting of flat auto glass;
• processing of curved glass.

Although doing such work with your own hands, in general, is not difficult, but it requires painstaking work and does not tolerate fuss and haste.

Therefore, in order to carry out high-quality tinting of car windows, you should allocate a sufficient amount of free time, and most importantly, prepare the necessary tools and materials.

Preparing for tinting

Almost everything that is necessary for the implementation of work is available on the farm for the vast majority of people:

• water sprayer;
• sharp blade or clerical knife;
• soft, clean, lint-free rags;
• detergent;
• rubber spatula.

You will also need warm water. You can tint a car with your own hands without a hair dryer, but it greatly speeds up the process, therefore, if there is one, then you must use it. Didactic material, which is available in abundance on the Internet, helps a lot in preparing for work. Videos and photos showing how the phased tinting of car windows is carried out will clearly show all the subtleties of the process that cannot be expressed in words.

Glass preparation

A prerequisite for the quality of tinting is a preliminary washing of the car and the workplace. Small grains of sand are the main cause of possible defects. Car tinting is carried out exclusively on a clean surface and in fairly sterile conditions. It is clear that it will not be possible to create operating conditions in the garage, but there should not be any clouds of dust while working with the film either. The car windows are washed on both sides with soapy water and then dried thoroughly.

Care must be taken to ensure that no villi remain on the surface. The most convenient way to do this is with a blade or a clerical knife, which will help clean the car windows.

After that, a foam solution is prepared. For this purpose, you can use any shampoo or detergent that is available. The solution is poured into the sprayer and at this the preparatory stage is completed and the main action begins.

Preparing the film for gluing

Car glass blanks are cut in different ways. You can make stencils-patterns from improvised material and work with them. Using this method, you can achieve a perfect match in size, but in time it will be quite long. The easiest way is to attach the film with the reverse side outside the car and cut it in place. First, the bottom and sides are adjusted with maximum accuracy, and then the top, where an allowance of a few centimeters remains.

Work should begin with the side windows of the car, which have a flat surface. Having trained on them and having achieved a positive result, you can proceed to a more difficult task - cutting blanks for the windshield and rear window, if you also decide to tint them yourself. If possible, it is better to see how this is done on a video or step-by-step photos, because it is very important to achieve a snug fit of the film to the glass of the car and so that there are no gaps at the edges.

Flat and curved glass tinting

The third and fourth stages of work follow the same principle, but the last one is much more difficult, especially for those who have not previously done such things. In the process, the following main points can be distinguished:

• separation of the protective layer of the film;
• spraying glass with soapy water;
• gradual application of tinting to the surface to be glued;
• removal of air bubbles and alignment.

It is very convenient to separate the protective layer using adhesive tape, which is glued on both sides of the film. The soap solution provides a good glide, so the tint can be easily adjusted in place. A spatula is needed in order to disperse air bubbles around the edges and remove them from under the film. If it is made of rubber, then you can not be afraid to tear the thin material of the glued coating.

Without a hair dryer, it is quite difficult to fit a flat film under curved glass; it allows, by heating the material, to deform it a little, providing a snug fit over the entire surface.

finishing touches

Do-it-yourself tinting is completed by drying the glued film. For this purpose, it is convenient to use a hair dryer, but it is not necessary to be too zealous in heating so that the coating material does not deform from heating. It is best not to touch the results of the work for three days, then everything is guaranteed to dry out, and the film will stay on the glass for a long time and with high quality.

Do-it-yourself tinting will provide an opportunity to save money, but, most likely, for the first time it will look worse than professional work in a car repair shop. But even the most outstanding masters once started their work, taking the first steps and making mistakes. If you watch videos and photos showing cars tinted by self-taught craftsmen, then it is impossible to distinguish the results of their work from branded products.

Only those who move forward all the time can win, which means that if today it didn’t turn out very well, then next time it will come out much better. The main thing is not to give up, learn from professionals and improve your own skills.