When it’s any warm time of the year, no one likes getting into a car or truck that’s been sitting in the sun for any length of time. Especially if that car is a classic without the luxury feature of air condition. The sun heats the vehicle like an oven, turning the interior into a prison sweatbox-like chamber of discomfort. And if said vehicle has leather or vinyl seats, it can be like sitting on a hot griddle ready for cooking Sunday morning breakfast.
To help keep heat out of a vehicle’s interior, Heatshield Products developed its Stealth Shield thermal barrier material to significantly reduce the transfer of heat through a vehicle’s body panels into the vehicle interior. At only 1/8-inch thick, Stealth Shield easily installs behind interior fabric and carpeting without affecting fitment. It’s rated for a continuous heat of 1800 degrees F and 2000 degrees F of intermittent heat.
All that’s needed is some simple spray adhesive for installation. The felt-like material can be cut with regular scissors, so Stealth Shield can be shaped to handle the contours of floorpans and other panels easily.
To show how effective Stealth Shield is, we decided to do a little test. Most everyone thinks about the floor when it comes to insulating against heat, but often overlooked is the roof. Whether the vehicle is running or parked, the sun is always heating the roof a car or truck, and that heat is often transmitted directly into the interior. Using a simple baking sheet of similar gauge thickness to a typical roof panel, we set up to show how much heat Stealth Shield stops from being transmitted through the roof panel. This way you can see the difference it will make being underneath your interior’s carpet, and behind your headliner.
ABOVE: Our test medium for this blog, a simple heavy duty baking sheet of similar gauge thickness to a roof panel.
ABOVE: To install Stealth Shield all you need are a pair of regular scissors and a can of spray adhesive found at most parts stores, usually headliner adhesive. Because of Stealth Shield’s makeup an flexibility, you can easily fit it behind upholstery and into tight spaces to help block heat transmission.
ABOVE: Before installing the Stealth Shield, we set the cooking sheet up in the sun to simulate what a car roof sees. It was placed on top of two plastic stands that couldn’t conduct heat and throw off our test, while also allowing from some airflow underneath the sheet similar to how the roof’s underside would be in a typical vehicle. After four hours in the sun, we measured a temperature of 157 degrees F.
ABOVE: To test our baseline reading, and out of curiosity, we took a reading of the roof of the truck’s bed we used for setting up our test apparatus. We got a reading of 169 degrees F, no far from what out test pan gave us.
ABOVE: Using a physical contact temperature probe, we measured the underside of the test pan to see what it was reading, 154.4 degrees F.
After let the pan cool to room temperature (74 degrees F in this case) we installed our piece of Stealth Shield trimmed to fit the underside of the pan, then set it back up in the sun for a four hour period on a sunny day like the one we did our baseline measurements on. The surface facing the sun measured 174.5 degrees F, 17.5 degrees hotter than baseline. This increase can be attributed to the effect the Stealth Shield material has in stopping the transmission of heat energy through the top of the pan to the underside.
ABOVE: With the contact probe we measured the underside of the pan with the Stealth Shield installed. Our reading of 107.7 degrees was 46.7 degrees F cooler than our baseline, and 66.8 degrees F cooler than the opposite side of the pan we just measured at 174.5 degrees F. This is a huge drop, showing not only how much heat Stealth Shield blocks from getting through, but also how much less heat it will allow to be transmitted into the vehicle’s interior. And in a classic car or truck with no A/C, it makes for a huge improvement in interior comfort.
