Chris Landi wrote:
The bubbles will disappear after a while. It depends on which way your car faces during the day when it's parked at work. The more sun the quicker the bubbles disappear. They should be gone after a year though.
It sounds like Chris is referring to bubbles that may be trapped during installation, like with vinyl decals applied with water. If so, yes, those will disapear over time, but I think Jason is talking abiut ones that actually appear months/years later.
In the previous post I mentioned how they heat the film to the point of distortion to make it conform to a compound curve. Over time that can cause a problem. My car was professionally done in 1998 and came with a 7 year warranty. About a year ago the film on the rear window (the one with that infamous compound curve) started to bubble. None of the other windows were affected because they are flat or only curved in one direction. It's going to happen, and you just have to deal with it. The problem is most rear windows have a defroster making removal of the old film difficult. It can be done of course, but not quickly using a single-edged razor blade like the other windows.
Some of you may remember (say before 1990) the installers used to approach the compound-curved rear windows in a different manner. They would apply the film in 4"-6" wide strips, slightly overlapping each other, until the window was covered. The look was less than desirable, but at the time there were no other options. A little later, some of the high end shops would take the extra time to align those seams with the defroster lines and no one was the wiser. It looked better, but took a lot of extra effort to get it right. The upside was when they used a professional quality tint it rarely presented a problem with bubbles like mentioned above.