Vehicle & Commercial Window Tinting Chicago: Keep the Heat Out. Keep the Interior Looking New.

Why Window Tinting?

Three reasons, in the order customers actually give them. Heat, because a van that sits in the sun between stops turns into an oven and the driver pays for it all afternoon. Fade, because UV bleaches a dash, a seat and anything in the cargo area with a printed label on it. Privacy, because a van with glass and tools in the back is an invitation.

Window film is not wrap film. Wrap vinyl is cast, it goes on painted sheet metal, and it is applied from the outside. Window film is a polyester laminate, it goes on the inside face of the glass, and it is mounted wet. Same shop and the same bays, but a different product and a different set of hands.

Dyed, carbon, or ceramic?

Dyed film is the entry point. It darkens glass and cuts glare, and in a cheap grade it is the film that eventually turns purple and bubbles. Carbon film holds its color and rejects more heat than dyed without looking metallic. Ceramic is the one worth paying for on a work vehicle, because it rejects infrared heat at a given shade instead of relying on being dark, and it does not interfere with a phone, a radio, GPS or a telematics antenna the way older metallized films could. If the goal is a cooler cab rather than a darker window, ceramic is the answer.

Our Window Tinting Process

1. Confirm the vehicle and the goal. Year, make, body style, which glass, how dark, and whether this is about heat, privacy or both. Vehicle class is what decides how dark the front doors can legally go.
2. Clean the glass properly. Scrape, wash and squeegee the inside face, then drop the top edge of each door glass to reach the strip that hides in the channel. Almost every speck trapped under a finished tint job got missed at this step.
3. Cut and shrink. Film is sized on the outside of the glass or plotted from a pattern. Back glass is a compound curve, so the film is heat-shrunk on the outside until it lies flat before it ever goes inside.
4. Mount wet, from the inside. The film floats on a mounting solution, gets squeegeed out to the edges, and is trimmed to the dot matrix band and clear of the defroster lines.
5. Final look under shop lights, then a cure window. Haze and small water pockets are normal for the first few days while the mounting solution works its way out through the film.

Leave the windows up while that happens. Rolling a door glass down before the adhesive has set is the most common way a fresh tint job ends up with a peeled top edge.

What is legal on a Chicago work vehicle?

The number that governs this is visible light transmission, the share of light that the glass plus the film lets through. A lower number means a darker window. Illinois sets a floor for the windows beside the driver, and that floor is not the same for every vehicle class: a passenger car and a multipurpose passenger vehicle such as a cargo van or an SUV are treated differently, and glass behind the driver is treated differently again.

We are not going to quote you a statute from memory. We check your vehicle class against the current Illinois code before any film is cut, tell you what is legal on that specific body, and then you decide. Blacked out behind the B pillar and left legal up front is a normal job and we do it constantly. If you want something that will not pass, we will say so rather than sell it and let a traffic stop be the thing that tells you.

Glass a van may not have

Half the vans that come in have no rear glass at all. On a panel van the whole job is two front doors and sometimes a strip at the top of the windshield. On a crew van or a passenger wagon the cargo-area glass is where film does the most good, because that is what keeps product and equipment in the back from cooking through an August afternoon on the Dan Ryan.

Tint on a wrapped van: what goes on first?

Order matters here and it trips people up. Tint lives on the inside of the glass. Printed perforated window vinyl, the material that lets a driver see out through a graphic, lives on the outside. The two do not fight each other, but we sequence them so the glass is tinted and cured before any perf goes on the outside, and so nobody squeegees an outside graphic over film that has not set.

Tint does not go over a wrap, and it is not a substitute for one. A wrap carries your brand on painted panels; film handles the glass. On a fleet that gets both, doing them in one visit saves you a second trip across town, and the vehicle only loses a day once.

Taking old film off

We strip failed tint as well as install new. Dyed film that has gone purple and brittle comes off in pieces and leaves its adhesive behind, so the work is steam, patience and an adhesive remover rather than a fast pull. Back glass is the careful part, because the defroster lines sit on the inside face right under the film and a hurried pull takes them with it. If a vehicle has bad film on it, we would rather strip it properly and start on clean glass than lay new film over a failing bond.

Where the work happens

All of it happens indoors at 4711 N Lamon Ave #7 in Portage Park. Film does not care about your schedule but it cares a great deal about temperature. Cold glass makes a mounting solution sluggish and film will not shrink evenly, which is why a January tint job belongs in a heated bay and not in a parking lot. We run five bays across roughly 6,000 square feet with six installers, and there is secure indoor overnight storage if a vehicle needs to stay with us.

Chicago Fleet Wraps is women-owned, carries a 4.9-star average over 51 Google reviews, and has put graphics on 19,400+ vehicles. The company has been wrapping since 2001; the Chicago side of it dates to 2014. Fleets get a volume discount on the standard ladder, which opens at two vehicles: 3 percent for two to four, 7 percent for five to nine, 11 percent for ten through twenty-four, and 15 percent once you are at twenty-five or more. Pickup is free in Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, Will and McHenry, which spares you sending drivers across town one at a time.

Give us the vehicle list, the glass on each one, and the shade you have in mind. A real person replies inside 2 business hours, and the line-by-line quote lands within 24 hours of us having the details.