Removing Door Panels When Window Tinting

A quick guide to door trim removal when car window tinting.

Once your are fresh off your car window tinting training course and are ready to rock the world with your car window tinting skills you will most likely come across your first brick wall. That will be leaning to remove door panels to get your window film applied.

Some guys have the experience from work they have done in the past, maybe they used to do mechanical work or vehicle glazing and door trim removal is easy...but if you have never done any door trim removal, then you will have a learning curve ahead of you for sure in your quest to become a car window tinting ninja.

Many newbies who start out fresh will come up against many problems and door trim removal will probably be the toughest  to get their head around.
Here I recommend you start to use some of the car window tinting forums or seek the help of a mentor, the latter is easier said than done, as people who have worked hard to get the knowledge dont want to share it with the new kid on the block.
My advice is start off being friendly with other forum members, dont try and make out you are "The Bomb" when quite clearly you are not as you will get shot down in flames pretty quickly.

Ok, lets get back on topic, door panel removal, in most cases it will not be required to remove the full door panel, on lots of cars you can just pop the top of the door panel back and using a special hook tool, catch hold of the rubber moulding or rub rail at the top of the door, when this rubber trim is removed, you can install the film a little lower down in the door and stop any chance of the film peeling from the bottom upwards. This technique is good for lots of cars, I use it on some BMW's, Audis, Fords, Renaults and a host of others.

You need to equip yourself with some essential door trim removal tools like trim pullers and special clip tools but i think the most useful set of tools will be a set of Bojo trim tools, these are a set of plastic wedges which can be used without damaging any trim and are perfect for sliding between two plastic surfaces that need to be seperated or for exposing trim clips that run down the side of the door.

Next Time - How To Market Your New Car Window Tinting Business






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Tinting A Curved Rear Window

Quick and Dirty Tips For Dealing With Curved Windows

Curvature is one of the things you will learn to deal with early on in your car window tinting career, if you have undergone any sort of formal training, you will no doubt have spent the first few days of your training heat shrinking rear windows. I remember back to my first training session, the instructor grabed a window from a Renault clio, which at the time was one of the most difficult rear windows to shrink, he was just showing off basically that he could shrink the film in a few minutes, I was pretty blown away when i saw that to be honest.

I spent a good 2 days powder shrinking windows with talc, that was the technique we used and i continued powder shrinking for at least another 5 years, now I use a different method using Soap, but if I had to go back to using that damn powder shrink method I would not be a happy bunny. You can see my previous post on soap shrinking here. Although I found that I could shrink curved windows OK with powder but once I migrated to soap shrinking, the time taken when it came to heat shrinking pretty much halved overnight.

So what are the differences between the 2 methods?
When powder shinking, you use the powder to stop the film from sticking to the glass,  the powder sort of allows the film to float on the layer of powder and when you shrink the film with the heatgun, it doesnt stick to the glass.

The technique for powder shrinking is completely different to soap shrinking, when you powder shrunk, you still anchor the film in the 'H' pattern but then use a small circular motion with the heatgun as you flow left and right and dont focus so much on the fingers in the film like you would when wet shinking., it takes time to shrink a complete window, I would say around 20 minutes when you are a beginner, and thats for a fairly standard window, then you must perform a wet check, here you flush the powder out from under the film and smooth the film out with your hands, be careful as if you have'nt shrunk the film well, you may get a crease at this point.

With the soap shrink method, you tend to shrink a larger area of film at one time, not the small circles like when powder shrinking, and there is no need for a wet check either, as when you use a hard card with a felt edge, you can pin the film to the glass and make the film like a tight skin, you will get far fewer fingers popping up on the inside when you install the film. I just wish i discovered soap shrinking earlier in my carerre, the guys that are coming into the game now have it easy if they get a good trainer, one who taches tinting with door panels in place and soap shrinking. You can find out more on soap shrinking here.

When dealing with extreme curvature on back windows you may need to learn another technique as powder shrinking has it's limts and although I find you can do some pretty urved windows in soap, you will need to learn the Lift & Pull technique. this is a mix of wet shrinking and pulling, you need to leave the film longer than normal as you will need to pull the film by hand, i will try and find a video of the lift and pull method as a video can explain it better than I can.

Forgot to mention - to the guy who is using my articles and passing them off as his own, I am onto you! I dont write articles for you to rank your own site with!

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