1/27/2024 0 Comments Car window screen shade![]() I used the paper templates to measure the size of fabric I would need to cover the pieces and headed over to JoAnn Fabrics. ![]() And more importantly, people expect to see those kinds of window covers already, it would be strange to see a cars entire front window blacked out by my privacy window cover.Īnyway, now it was time to buy all of the material. I already have a reflective cover for my windshield, and so I didn’t feel the need to make my own. If you look closely, you might notice that I didn’t take a template of the front windshield. And since the two door and back side windows are symmetric I only had to take one template of each. The goal is to get an accurate template of each window shape in the car. I happen to have a giant roll of brown paper which made this easy, but you could use poster board, flattened out paper shopping bags, or piecemeal printer paper. Okay, with all that planning stuffs for these privacy window covers out of the way, my first step was to go out to my car and make paper templates of the windows. So even though I knew I wouldn’t get as much insulation as I could from this material, I continued to use Reflectix through this project. I could have used foam board, but those would have broken after a few uses and any other rigid material wouldn’t contour to the window’s curves. That all being said, I couldn’t think of another material rigid and yet flexible for pushing these into the window sills of my car and then storing them. In our application as vehicle dwellers, placing this right up against the hot metal walls of a van or against a window, it only acts as a radiation barrier and doesn’t actually do much to prevent heat from passing right through from either side. This trapped air is how the insulation works. It only has an insulative “R” value when it is allowed to have an air gap between two panels of the material. Reflectix is a composite insulation system usually used in basement ceilings and between roof trusses. But, I found that it’s actually not very good for this application. I wanted to use Reflectix because it’s what everyone else was using to insulate their vans and car campers. The Problem with ReflectixĪs an engineer, I had to look at all of these materials to see if they would work for my application. Besides figuring these details out, I had some other concerns. I was planning to use a spray adhesive like 3M’s Super 77 ( Amazon Link), but I wasn’t sure how to affix the edges of the fabric, either sewing them or using two layers of Reflectix and trapping the raw edges between the two panels. I knew I was going to use a material called Reflectix (basically a metallic bubble-wrap used in housing insulation, Here’s a link to the one I bought) and I would wrap the Reflectix in some kind of fabric to make it more appealing to look at from the inside and indistinguishable from the window from the outside. I had a general idea of what I wanted to make. ![]() Of everything I’ve learned about sleeping in a car, these privacy window covers are probably the thing I’m most excited to share since I think it’s so important and so equally overlooked. In this post I’ll discuss in detail what I made, how I did it, some problems I had, and what I did to solve them. So all together, I needed privacy window covers that blocked out all light, were easy to setup, simple to store, and were difficult for anyone outside to know they were in place. I also didn’t want to be woken up by excess light coming from passing cars or even the rising sun. I didn’t want anyone to be able to look through my windows and see me lying in there, for reasons of safety and of not being caught and asked to leave wherever I was parked. Privacy was probably my number one concern when considering living out of my car.
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