Those who have been following the fortunes of my MR2 will know that we painted it fluorescent orange a few years ago. As fluorescents tend to do, it faded badly. It was last seen looking something like this:
Clearly something needed to be done about it so I decided to try my hand at vinyl wrapping. Bought some appropriate tools and 10m of Avery Supreme gloss orange and set to work.
First off, remove all of the stickers to show just how much it's really faded:
Over time most of the old panels have been showered with grinder sparks leaving nice rust stains and general rougness to the panels. Rather than have to deal with this, some bolt on panels were replaced, others were rubbed down and given a quick coat of paint to cover up the massive contrast variations that would show through the very thin vinyl.
These first couple of panels were wrapped off the car to give me a chance to decide it was all too hard and give up. The louvres on the engine lid were tedious as anything!
All went ok though, so time to start for real. No going back now...
Biggest panel on the car done
Working down the passenger side
Similar story down the driver side, complicated by a fibreglass front wing where the paint reacted massively meaning I ended up prepping and using a spare one
Overall I'm happy with how it went. It's not a perfect job but for a first attempt and for a race car it's plenty good enough. Most of the imperfections are due to the underlying panel prep not being good enough with only a couple of minor areas where the wrapping isn't up to scratch (mostly minor creases where I could quite get rid of excess material). It was all part of the learning and if I did it again I reckon it's be pretty much spot on. The hardest parts of the car which were really worrying me were the ends of the rear quarters where the panel has some pretty tight curves in 2 dimensions and in the end those bits went really well.
A couple of nice shots before the stickers went on:
And one of the sponsor stickers:
Next plan is to sort out the rusty header rail across the top of the windscreen. This was going to mean having the screen out. This has now become a bit more pressing as the rust has caused the screen to start to crack at the top in the last week or so. I'm sprinting at Anglesey this weekend and I expect the crack to be right down the screen by the time we're done, it's likely that the journey up on the trailer will be enough to do it! Once I've got the header rail repaired the plan is to wrap all of the black bits with a gloss metallic black.
Clearly something needed to be done about it so I decided to try my hand at vinyl wrapping. Bought some appropriate tools and 10m of Avery Supreme gloss orange and set to work.
First off, remove all of the stickers to show just how much it's really faded:
Over time most of the old panels have been showered with grinder sparks leaving nice rust stains and general rougness to the panels. Rather than have to deal with this, some bolt on panels were replaced, others were rubbed down and given a quick coat of paint to cover up the massive contrast variations that would show through the very thin vinyl.
These first couple of panels were wrapped off the car to give me a chance to decide it was all too hard and give up. The louvres on the engine lid were tedious as anything!
All went ok though, so time to start for real. No going back now...
Biggest panel on the car done
Working down the passenger side
Similar story down the driver side, complicated by a fibreglass front wing where the paint reacted massively meaning I ended up prepping and using a spare one
Overall I'm happy with how it went. It's not a perfect job but for a first attempt and for a race car it's plenty good enough. Most of the imperfections are due to the underlying panel prep not being good enough with only a couple of minor areas where the wrapping isn't up to scratch (mostly minor creases where I could quite get rid of excess material). It was all part of the learning and if I did it again I reckon it's be pretty much spot on. The hardest parts of the car which were really worrying me were the ends of the rear quarters where the panel has some pretty tight curves in 2 dimensions and in the end those bits went really well.
A couple of nice shots before the stickers went on:
And one of the sponsor stickers:
Next plan is to sort out the rusty header rail across the top of the windscreen. This was going to mean having the screen out. This has now become a bit more pressing as the rust has caused the screen to start to crack at the top in the last week or so. I'm sprinting at Anglesey this weekend and I expect the crack to be right down the screen by the time we're done, it's likely that the journey up on the trailer will be enough to do it! Once I've got the header rail repaired the plan is to wrap all of the black bits with a gloss metallic black.
