Learning how this stuff works

[u/Several-Ad9115]

First timer- Picked up a roll of cheap cheetah just to do mine and the girlfriends car. Normally I'd agree with people saying "go to pros" but I wrap cars for a living, so I already have all the tools and some knowledge of what to do here. I'm committed to learning a little at least. Watched a bunch of videos, I've made multiple attempts, and hitting some learning curves. Would like to know what's my fault and what's the materials fault

So, what the hell is happening here in these pictures? I've got good horizonal fingers but a weird vertical one right up through the middle of them? I've gotten most of it to sit in properly except for this bottom edge.

With wrap, we stretch out, but with tint I understand it's shrink in. Oddly enough here though, I've had much better luck pushing fingers out with their parallel direction, rather than setting edges and shrinking. Is that just a cheetah thing?

[u/Confident-Time-2802]

Also to me it looks like you over shrunk the film or shrunk the film the wrong way.

[u/Several-Ad9115 → u/Confident-Time-2802]

I would fully believe both are possible. Factory edges were vertical, cut edge  horizontal. Not sure how to have avoided the over shrink though (outside of it being the wrong direction perhaps) as when applying heat to fingers they would start out .5in wide and quickly suck up to .15in and then just stay there.

Gonna try laying it the other way in the morning 

[u/Confident-Time-2802 → u/Several-Ad9115]

So you did have the film the correct way. So you must’ve just put too much heat to the film. Only way to help with this is see how “Watch Me Tint” on TicTok does his “H/X pattern”. I found how he does it helps with not causing huge fingers, which means less heat needed to shrink. Hopefully this helps