Dot Matrix Blues

Hate it or HATE IT!!!!! Dot Matrix is here to stay... if you are not sure what it is, go and take a look at your car windows, on a lot of cars nowadays you will see that where the clear glass meets the black part of the glass, you will see a dotted edge at the point these two areas meet - This is called Dot Matrix.

This dot matrix area is something that window tinters the world over hate..in fact, I dont know of anybody who is in the window tinting game who has a good word to say for it!
So why the big downer on Dot Matrix...firstly, it is one obvious sign to the customer who has had their windows tinted that the windows may not look like factory tinted glass, they can see the silvery appearance that ocours on this part of the glass, and no matter how clean you have carried out the installation, they will look at this and think.."They have not done a proper job!"

Listen...dot matrix is something you can deal with as part of the installation, but at a cost to the customer!
I always show them a car with normal matrix and say that you may have a silver appearance on this area of the glass, let them get any objections out of the way early, before you have done the work, if they sound like they are not impressed with the look of the dot matrix, then offer them a solution, tell them that you can do the extra work involved in making the dot matrix look better, but at a price. It may take an hour extra to go around all the dots and heat them down into position, this is a pain in the aas job!...i know some installers who do this off the bat, but if they are not charging for their time taken to do this - it's their loss.

One option is to tell the customer to push down the matrix in a week, some tint shops tell the customer to bring the car back in a week and they can take a look, I thinks its better to show them how, when you push the wet dot matrix down with your thumb, it looks better, if you invite every customer to come back after a week i think you will regret it! You will have them visiting you on a regular basis then, thinking they are not doing it right...dont go down that road unless you really want to!

I wil be posting some tips in the next article on how to improve the look of your dot matrix, you need a few different approaches depending on the type of windows you are tinting.

Get more window tinitng tips here.

Keep tuned.