One last final mod for now on the new Duramax. So factory, when you buy this truck new, the tint on the front is quite a bit lighter than the tint on the rear windows, so today this entire truck is going in for a full tint. Really going to be putting my skills to the test. I have fully tinted two vehicles now. I wanted to get really, really good at it before I attempted to tint my brand new truck because this thing, of course, needs to be perfect.
Now unfortunately, we’re going to have to pop these window visors back out. It’s much easier to tint this window without the visor in the way. Is it possible, maybe, for a professional? But for Devon, probably not possible. If we take a look at the factory tint, not even this tint is perfect. There’s like a little jagged edge right there, super big gap from the edge to the window right there, so it makes me feel a little bit better about my tint jobs.
Let’s go peel this tint off that’s leaving all of the glue on the window. So I’m going to try my handy dandy little steamer and see if that’s going to help. Oh yeah, that definitely helps a lot. Look at that. Hard to remove the glue that stayed on the window. I definitely think it’s going to be a good idea to pop off these door panels.
So on the front, if you pull out that little cover, there’s two 7mm bolts under there, and one 7mm bolt on the bottom of the door panel. So there were the two bolts there, two bolts on the bottom of the panel, and then a bunch of clips. As soon as you get the panel out, you’ll have this little cable right here—disconnect that, disconnect the wiring harness, panel comes off.
I did decide to remove that trim piece as well and that seal. Now we have full access to the window. We need to go ahead and get the glue off of this thing, so what I’m going to do is spray it down with the Windex, grab a razor blade, scrape off the glue, and we can get to tinting our first window.
Tint is removed, all the glue is removed. Let’s go and get some tint on the outside of that window, get it cut to the proper shape and size, and then we need to thoroughly clean the inside of the window where the tint will be applied. So this is a 22-inch width. I got a few different widths, but this here is a 22 because that’s all we need. That window is 20 inches high, and then we’re going to need 33 inches long.
All right, that’s about 34 inches; that’ll be plenty. Spray a bit of slip solution, and the first thing that I’m going to do is line up this bottom edge so that is one less cut. That should be plenty there; give her a light tack down, and now we’re going to grab a Sharpie. I’m going to Sharpie on the outside of the tint, so on the clear side, the layer that you peel off.
I’m going to Sharpie the front, Sharpie the back edge, go ahead and roll the window down, make that top cut, and then we’re going to pull the tint off the truck. I need to get—you know how those tint shops have like a big glass thing on the wall for doing for making cuts like this? I need to get something like that. For now, I’ll probably just set it on the windshield of the Typar or something, and then go ahead and make my cuts there—a little bit more difficult doing a big old truck like this.
The reason for the Sharpie is to avoid cutting into our seals. Of course, I could just grab a knife, plop it on the window, and make our cuts, but it’s a brand new truck. I want to keep it a brand new truck for as long as possible. Okay, so there’s that. Let’s pull out that bottom edge a little bit so that we can roll it down. I’m going to squeegee it on just a little bit more; this can’t move around at all. Okay, we should be good there. I don’t think it moved whatsoever.
And now arguably the most important cut, because it’s really the only one you can see, is this top edge. Now we’re going to take this tint, put it on our cutting glass, which is going to be the brand-new Typar windshield, and get it trimmed up. Just going to grab this straight edge here, line it up with our Sharpie mark, grab my knife, and make my cut.
Our tint is all trimmed up. Now we need to clean the inside of the window. I already razor-bladed it, now I’m going to run through with my scrub pad, get it 100% perfect, make sure those edges are nice and clean. All right, let’s give her one good final squeegee, and this thing will be ready for its tint. Soap her down one more time, grab our tint, apply it, squeegee it on, and if it looks good, we’re done with the first window.
Yeah, I should probably get a little glass on the wall. Here I am walking across the entire shop with tint in my hand that can’t get any dust or dirt on it, next to all the dirty cars. So the goal is to get it on the window without touching it, touching the glue side with your bare hands, or touching the glue side to anything but the window. It’s pretty difficult for me to achieve that, but I think we did all right. And then with that slip solution on, you can kind of line it up where it needs to be—something like that. That looks pretty good.
Lightly mist it with your slip solution, and I always like to start with squeegeeing this top edge. Line it up, you need a little bit of a gap so it’s not catching, make sure we got full coverage at the outside. Outside looks great. Just a light squeegee to start, and then I’ll remist it and hit it with a power squeegee.
As you can see, I have the window partially rolled down, and that is so that we can get that top edge lined up properly. And then at the end, I’ll roll it all the way up and seal off that bottom edge. At first, I just had a light squeegee just to make sure the film is in place. Now power squeegee time. This is kind of a piece of junk. I need to buy a nice one, but this is really just going to get all of that water out from underneath the film. Man, this window turned out phenomenal! Look at that!
Third vehicle getting tinted, so the window’s finished from here all the way down to about here. Now what we need to do is squeegee all that out. Okay, that’s that. First window’s done. Now all we need is this seal—it goes on first. Trim piece for the top—this trim piece right here—pretty pointless to remove, and it took about 30 minutes to get it back on properly, so the next window I’m going to attempt to leave that on.
So that window took two hours. Let’s see if we can do this window in half the time; that’d be nice. Rear window took 20 minutes to get done. Now here’s why: The front—I don’t know if it’s like a dealer-installed tint, but it’s not a factory tint, I guess you would say. The rears, it’s actually like stained into the window, so there is no removal of the rear tint. Very, very easy to get the rears done.
Now here’s the thing: Look how freaking dark the rears are. My guess is that would meter at probably 2%. I definitely do not want the fronts that dark. The fronts are still dark, but that’s really, really dark, which’ll be super nice. So not only am I making this truck look way better with tint, but this is actually a very, very, very high-end ceramic tint, which has like a 98% heat rejection or something ridiculous like that.
So that’ll be nice because Mr. Piston rides in the back seat. There is an AC vent in the back of the truck, but that’ll be super nice for him as well. But yeah, that rear is done. Same concept on this rear window back here. That’s all stained tint, so there’s no removal there. I will apply some 5% over that, so it’s going to be super dark as well. But let’s go ahead and knock out this rear.
For reference, it’s about to turn 1:00—12:59. Let’s see how long this window takes me. Window took 14 minutes. Not bad. So the passenger side is complete. Driver side is all complete. Now let’s move on to this rear window here. Like I said, it’s already pretty dark, but I want it even darker. So this bottom edge I’ll line up—one less seam to cut. And what I did is I flipped the truck around, opened the door, so all the light’s coming through the windshield. Makes it a lot easier to see that black edge—the black border to trim around.
Now from here, we clean and install. Rear window was definitely the easiest. Yeah, yeah, I haven’t either. Our rear window is complete. Got a 5% on the very back with the factory tint. It’s probably a 2%, just like the sides—rear sides, not the front sides. Let’s go ahead and finish off with a nice light 40% on the windshield. It’s really going to complete the look, and that’s going to be super nice for the summer when it’s 280 million degrees outside, the sun’s beaming down.
It’s going to reject a ton of that heat out of the inside of the truck.
All right, let’s get some tint laid out on the outside of the windshield. Got it all cleaned. Go ahead and knock out the shrinking. It’s probably a little more solution than I would typically do, but I’m trying to get this windshield shrunk on my first try. There we go. Nice and freaking milky, man. Let that dry up, we’ll be ready to shrink, and after it’s all dried up, that’s how she looks.
Let’s take our tint, get her slapped on the windshield, and get to shrinking. Twenty-six minutes later, we now have a completely shrunk window tint. Now we need to trim. So I got my light on the inside here so we can see a little better—giving it about an eighth of an inch of overlap. Then from here, all we do is pop on the inside, clean the inside of the windshield, apply the tint, squeegee it out, and the truck will be done.
The truck is now fully tinted, and here is how she looks. Man, oh man, this thing looks amazing. Here it is from the side. The rear is a little bit darker than the front, but honestly, you can’t really tell unless you’re inside of the truck. Rear window is very, very dark, but that does not affect the rearview mirror whatsoever because the rearview mirror goes off the camera right there.
And here she is from the front—not crazy dark up front, but just enough. Overall, I’m very, very, very happy with not only how it looks but that it’s going to be super nice for those hot summer days. I tell you what: It took me three tries to get that front windshield done, not because of shrinking. Shrinking that windshield was actually fairly simple, but just trying to get it installed on the windshield is very, very, very tight to the dash, and of course, it’s a brand-new truck. There are a bunch of electronics—heads-up display, all that jazz—going on, so I had to be very careful not to get any of that wet.
But everything so far seems to be working fine, so I don’t think I messed anything up. But I guess we’ll see. Hope you guys enjoyed today’s video. Peace out, my friends. I’ll see you guys in the next video.
