Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Intersection fairings - good place to start

I decided to start my vinyl wrap project with the upper intersection fairings. I figured it would teach me everything I needed to know whilst not consuming tooooo much vinyl.

Here we go...

Through trial and mostly error, it finally dawned on me that I needed to hold down the piece being wrapped. I quickly came to the conclusion that applying vinyl is like working with fly paper.














How much vinyl to cut? I used blue painters tape to wrap the piece (see pics below) and then cut the vinyl to at least twice the size of the pattern to account for the bends and stretches. Using too much vinyl is better than using too little.



















 Again through trial and error I learned to start at the end with the most complex curves and work backwards. While applying I used a heat gun and scissors to relieve the tension in the vinyl as I str


 You can watch a helmet being wrapped. Same idea and useful for when you do the wheel pants.























Here we see the main problem encountered when wrapping. The vinyl sticks to itself and bunches up as shown to left.

Putting backing around the edges would help, but I was too lazy to try it here.

This is where I added tweezers to the list of tools.
And this is the finished product.














3 comments:

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  2. Thank you for your interesting home page!
    On my RV-7A I wrapped the wheel pants and the wingtips as well as the glare shield with 1080, matte brown. Most of the plane is polished. When will you wrap the spinner? i would like to do it in one piece.
    Regards!

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  3. The spinner is next on my agenda. Search YouTube for "Helmet Wrap with 380 Vinyl". The technique is essentially to plunge the spinner into a piece of vinyl stretch over a 55 gal. (US) drum. I have a lot of updating to do on my blog. Would like a picture of your RV7.
    Vince

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