MCD Innovations

Introduction

Many RVs come with pleated day-night shades that have been known to plague RVers. They have two steps of shade material - a translucent sun filtering day shade followed by an opaque privacy shade for nighttime use. They are held together with thin strings that frequently break, causing the shades to fall down. These are the shades that came in my 2007 Allegro Bus. Tiffin Motorhomes began using MCD roller shades in recent years and they have been getting rave reviews by RVers so we looked forward to upgrading the shades in our coach to MCD shades. After doing my research I was invited to come down to MCD's facilities in McKinney, Texas for my installation. I felt this was a great opportunity to learn more about the product, the company, and the actual installation process. MCD opened their doors wide for me and gave me full access to their production line as well as their service techs. I learned more about their company, their products, and just how to install them. I took plenty of photos so the following links will take you to a series of webpages that offer tutorials on all of these subjects.

MCD Innovations has long enjoyed a great reputation for making quality products and backing them with great customer service. In my first chapter I'll detail what I've learned about MCD and detail my experience with them. The next chapter will detail the various products they have to offer as well as the pros and cons and benefits to RVers. The third entry will document their windshield shades. In this chapter I'll describe how they work, how they compare to other options, and finally cover their installation in my coach in detail. The next chapter will detail their manually operated roller shades, as well as the valance requirements, and finish up with the actual installation tutorial. Following that I'll do the same for the remote powered roller shades as well as cover the various controller options available. Finally, I'll describe the various generations of manual roller shades as well as detailed procedures on how to identify which generation you have, and how to adjust them.

During the installation I had the benefit of watching and learning from one of their installation techs who had done over 600 installations. I learned many installation tips and secrets during this time and have included them in each area's installation tutorial. By the time you read these tutorials you will know whether or not this is a do-it-yourself project that you may want to undertake, or if you should have the work done by someone who does this regularly. You will gain the benefit of years of experience and you might be surprised as to how easy it is to perform this project yourself.

Now that I have my MCD shades installed I have to say that I am very happy with them. You would think that shades are shades but that's not true. MCD has some real advantages and benefits that others do not have. Read on and you'll see what I mean.

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Mark Quasius - "Cruzer"

Index