Top layer peels easily with xacto-tools or razor blade, using a hair dryer to warm up glue ahead of where you pull. Lay detergent and hot water soaked paper towels over the remaining tint and keep wet for an hour. Pick and peel away. Rubbing alcohol for the glue, or something safe to avoid defroster grid damage.

Can't find a consensus on factory tint percentage. Did tinted windows come standard on the 1998 Sport model?

 

My 98 sport has factory tint but its literally tinted glass. not applied tint. Judging by that I am going to say that yours is aftermarket

 

Yup. Factory tint is IN the glass. Any "film" tints are aftermarket.

 

I replaced all my aftermarket tint glass, that turned purple, with factory tinted glass. Factory on top. No idea of the percentage though.

 

It used to be.. many many years ago now,.. and of course, in my home state of MA, that you could go no more than:
6" down from the top of the front windshield - any %
No more than 35% on the front side windows
Up to 90% on all side windows behind the front doors
Spray painted black on the rear window.

.... The good old days. If you liked tint and wanted to be harassed by the police.... you know, the guys who can have 95% on every window but the front...

 

When someone says "35% tint", that usually refers to 35% light emission, not that it blocks 35% of light. So, instead of 90% here, do you mean 10% emission?

 

Yes - as you can see, 20 years has caused chaos with my memory.

 

All good! Missouri has similar laws:

Any non-reflective tint allowed only above the AS-1 line on the windshield.
No darker than 35% emissive on the front door windows
Any darkness on rear side and read windows.

That is actually more lenient than it used to be. When I was a teenager, you couldn't go darker than 20% in the rear. I still use the 35/20% scheme.

 

It's funny, but I was thinking back to my youth when I worked in retail auto parts (A local chain called "Auto Palace" that eventually got bought out by Autozone.) and I feel like I always had that dyslexia about the tint values. Personally I never cared for tint or the "style" stuff, but I always had to do the "subtract from 100".
We had a healthy population of young men (and a few women) in that area that were all about that stuff and several times a day an unhealthy sounding (mechanically speaking,... and non-mechanically ) Honda/Acura/Toyota would pull up with a ridiculous looking black strip down the front windshield, bubbling film tint on all the windows and an aftermarket wing that looked like steel scaffolding would pull up and the folks that stepped up would be looking for tint or decals or a god awful sounding muffler.
To each their own, but I always found that "style" to be horrendous and absurd.
I did allow a buddy to convince me to tint the front windows on my TJ (the hard-top was factory tint) and it didn't come out too bad. I insisted on the legal levels, so I think it was 35 (the top I think is 20) - however this was for the privacy factor as that buddy was very much into rolling his own smoking supplies... and back then (unlike today in MA) the state laws about that sort of thing were quite prohibitive....

I think MA has gotten more lenient as well. Our state inspection is very strict and there is a category where the shop is supposed to verify the window tint, but in the 12 years I had the aftermarket tint not once did any shop even remotely verify me or anyone else that I saw. These days you see all kinds of civilian vehicles with heavy tint and valid MA inspection stickers.

Good times though!

 

Right. Good times except for the style. I'm with you on that...

There's still a few kids around here with terrible sounding mufflers on civics, but nothing like it was 25-30 years ago. I remember our first "Auto Shack" here back in the late 70s, before Tandy (Radio Shack) forced the name change to Autozone. Man, there was some real add-on crap in there back then. Even worse than it is today. Sparkomatic anyone? LOL

 

Around here it was about 20 years ago. Auto Palace was interesting - they had a ton of "retail" stuff.. all the add-on crap. The parts desk was in the back (like a Pep boys type setup) and we had a selection of parts. It was so long ago and perhaps behind the times that I remember a lot of paper catalogue searching for part numbers - these giant reams of part catalogues. If we didn't have a part we'd order it from the "warehouse". AKA - calling one of our local competitors and they'd deliver the parts like we were a garage rather than another auto store marking up their parts.

Then Autozone wanted a presence in the Northeast and they bought the chain (something like 115 locations). I remember the guys came up to "orient" us and they were from Tennessee with real southern drawls and we both thought each other sounded funny. Then the utterance of the phrase that lived in infamy the rest of my time there --- "Y'all make too much money up here!" - in a perfect southern drawl, of course. (We obviously strongly disagreed. This was when MA minimum wage was $6 something an hour.. most of us were making no more than 75c over that... And the cost of living then, as it is now, is absurd here.) To this day the location I worked at looks messed up because the store was less than half the "standard" Autozone size, so there are like 6 tiny aisles of "retail" stuff and the parts storage is 2 areas.. the original "out back" and half the old Auto Palace retail floor.

Autozone had the DOS style computers then and everything ran a heck of a lot smoother with inventory. The best change - IMO the greatest thing ever - the embroidered name on your AZ shirt. It was all computerized, so I ordered my buddy (the tint guy) an Autozone shirt 3XL with the name "Lano Bongripper" (it was delivered and embroidered - Bongripper and all!!). To this day my "working on the car" shirt is my AZ shirt with the embroidered name "Big Daddy" XLT.

 

That does sound like fun. I was working at a bicycle shop back in those days. Our parts catalogs were a lot smaller. LOL

I totally appreciate the accent thing as well. You don't have to drive far from my place to get the heavy drawls. There aren't too many people that sound like the Tappet brothers around here! Hehe Yeah, I'm sure the difference in pay didn't make up for the cost of living at all. It's cheap to live in TN, and here in MO for that matter.

 

I will say, TN is beautiful. I had a business trip there about a decade ago and it was spectacular weather, great people. I guess I wouldn't have been that far away from your general area since the trip was to a town outside Nashville.
It is funny how quick the accents can change. I'm 45m west of Boston and nobody here has the "southie" accent. We just drop our "r"'s and have the general grumpiness our region is known for.

To illustrate how bad it is here - I bought my XJ for $800 in CT. In MA you pay sales tax (currently 6.5%) upon switching the Title, regardless of where the purchase was made. So did I pay $50 or so (6.5% of 800)... of course not. You pay the tax on the Blue book value - as determined by the RMV. The MA RMV blue-book value for my 23y old regular Cherokee (SE model) with 295k on the odometer -- $4400.. so I paid the state of MA nearly $300 tax on my $800 vehicle (plus title fee, registration, etc). Then, 3 weeks later your town sends you an Excise tax bill. You get one every year for every vehicle with a valid plate. $25/per 1000 of value. However, they at least pro-rate it so i only had to pay for the last 3m of the year. And of course I'll get another bill any day for this year - just for having a car.

 

The tint on my 94 is film, and the build sheet says tinted windows.

 

Has the Jeep ever been in an accident? There's a good chance the window glass was replaced with clear glass and then film tinted to match the original. Hopefully with full disclosure/consent to the owner at the time.