Fish bowl for life!

I don't understand window tint.  I mean for a lot of people, the purpose of the tint is to make your car look cool, because chicks dig cool cars, right?  But how can chicks dig the driver if his windows are tinted and she can't see him?  Sure, if you live where the sun is always beating down having dark windows will help keep the interior cooler, but I'm from Wisconsin.  "Hot" is a thing we do for a few days once a year. Plus, every friend I have with non-factory tinted windows has been hassled about it and has had to have it stripped at least once for a "fix it" ticket.

Since this is a winter car, I actually want the sun beating down and warming the thing up.  The tint on the Impala was bad too.  It was old, and cheap tint, so it was purple and bubbly.  You could barely see through the back window.  And the Driver's door wasn't tinted, the guy said it was replaced a few years ago.  I've razor blade scraped tint off before.  Many years ago, I de-tinted my Dad's '56 Chevy.  I must have taken me a week or two, and that had less glass than the Impala. 

I actually thought about paying to have it stripped, but I'm a cheap bastard so it was internet to the rescue again.  I looked into the best ways to remove old tint.  I didn't want to razor scrape a car this size, and I also didn't want to risk damaging the rear defroster. The internet, as usual, had the answer: ammonia and garbage bags.  What you do is spray the tint down with ammonia, cover it with a black garbage bag, and let it soak in the sun for awhile.  The door windows were easy, the rears not so much, but the plastic still clung to the wet tint.

This works AMAZING.  The door glass tint all came off in giant sheets.  Because of the bubbles and the defroster lines, the back window came off in chunks, but they were very big chunks.  All told, it took less than an afternoon to strip all the tint.  Really, the hardest part of the whole job was breathing inside the car filled with ammonia fumes.  Fish Bowl for life!