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The Window Tint
I hate window tint. Really, I hate
it. It is a pain in the rear to put it on, and worse to take off.
In New York, there are very specific laws about window tint. You
can't have it on the front door windows. You can have it on back
door windows, and the rear window, but there are rules about how much
light it can block. The degree of tint you are allowed to have
allows so much light in the vehicle that it is hardly worth bothering
with having it at all.
The Maxima had tint on the windows when I got it.
There was tint on the back window, covering the defroster grid. It
doesn't really look good, but it is so difficult to remove the tint
without scratching the defroster grid that I guess I'm just going to
leave that alone. It also had tint on all four door windows.
The passengers side rear window tint was torn loose and crumpled where
the wooden bock had been used to hold the window up. On the front
door windows it is illegal, so I decided to remove the tint from the
door windows. What a pain.
The best way that I have found to go about this is a
two step process. First, get a nice new sharp razor blade, put it
in a scraper handle, and start at the edges of your tint. For the
door windows, I rolled the window down a bit which exposed the top edge
of the tint. I then used the scraper to lift an edge. Once
there was a loose edge, I pulled it with my hands and removed large
strips of the tint that way. Some scraping was necessary to remove
well stuck, stubborn bits, and the stuff along the edges near the window
channel, and at the bottom of the window, near the weatherstrip.
Once I had the tint removed, I went on to step two.
I wet a piece of paper towel with rubbing alcohol. I then wiped a
small section of the window with the rubbing alcohol, which softens the
glue that the tint left behind. With the glue still wet and soft,
I used the sharp razor scraper to scrape the glue off the window, and
then wiped the glue off the razor onto a clean dry paper towel. I
repeated this process until I had removed all the glue from the window.
A few small sections needed to be scrubbed good with the alcohol, and
then wiped clean with dry paper towels to get a nice clean finish on the
whole window. It is a time consuming task, but the windows look a
hundred times better with the old messed up tint removed, and I don't
have to worry about getting a ticket for it. |