OK well, after I’m done w/ my day on Thursday I'm taking my car in for tint. The guy who is doing the job was recommended to me by a fellow g35c owner who used him. Anyway, I want 13-15% all around, and possibly 5% in the back. He's removing my current dealer tint (35%) with some method he has that doesn't involve a razor, I guess he lets the car sit in the sun for an hour during this removal process... I took a glance a few weeks ago at the rear deck. It looks like the brake light housing is VERY close to the window, so close that there’d be no way to squeegee the water out from under the tint in that area.. What did your installers do for this section? Did they remove that panel? I plan on bringing some towels so he doesn’t get the seats & rear deck all wet... Anything else I should know?

 

Ask how he'll get the tint stuck to the dot-matrix. Some tinters do it no problem, others have to use a different method. But by asking, at least he'll know it's an issue with you and work to do it right. I have to take mine back in for bad adhesion over the rear window's dot-matrix. If I had known about the difficulty from the start, I would have asked the question beforehand.

 

Yea, thats a good idea. I had to take mine in a second time as well to get that fixed.

 

Yeah i'll make sure to comment on that... I've seen some people put in a vinyl strip, but it looks really dumb from the inside. Nobody has any info about the rear brake light housing and how it's like 1/2" from the rear window?

 

Just a guess here, but he'll probably take it off.

 

My installer removed the brake light housing.

He will spray the back window with an ammonia solution, cover it up with some plastic and let it sit in the sun to make it possible to remove without scraping or else your rear window defrosters and radio antenna will no longer work. They will probably use a razor blade to get all the adhesive off the side windows and back quarter windows. Just make sure that the black edge around the quarter window, called a frit, doesn't get scratched. If it does they have a special marker to fill it back in. Also, make sure they file down the top and side edge of the front windows so that they are less likely to get caught on the weather stripping and peel off.

Finally, make sure that you get the actual VLT of the tint that you want from the manufacturer. Manufacturers usually produce tints in four classes: 50, 35, 20 and 5. These numbers are an approximation of the tints visible light transmission coefficient. An actual 22% VLT is a huge difference from a 17% VLT even though both manufacturers market them as 20 tint.

 

Just a heads up. Don't know if it applies or not, as I have a sedan, but my tint in my 04 really screwed with my AM reception. I understand that most people don't listen to AM, but I listen to a *lot* of sports talk, and I can barely get a signal anymore in that car after the tint(antenna is in the rear window).

 

Yea, don't get metallic if you have navigation.

 

Make sure you tell them to be very careful not to melt the top of the inside door panel close to the window. It is Not leather.. it is plastic. That happened to me and several others on this board. The installers paid for the full cost of replacing the entire inside door panel because they melted a nickle sized section using a heating gun from the outside of the window. The tint job was GREAT and I got it 50% off for my troubles.

 

Get metallic tints on the sides, go with ceramic on the back. Looks good, rejects a lot of heat and no probs with AM or radar.