I Vinyl Wrapped My RC Car
I just finished vinyl wrapping my WPL D12.
Usually there are tons of posts here with really nicely painted body shells and modified cars and just like any creative person i started thinking, however, i have been looking at real car wraps and how nice some of those cars can be after a well done wrap. So i thought, why not do it on my D12?
I went into this project thinking i just wanted to try it out, so i bought the absolute cheapest "car wrap" i could find and got to work. This was the biggest mistake, it didn't stretch very well and the adhesive wasn't all that strong but, oh well, i was just going to try it out so i stuck to it and continued working on it with the mindset that i would probably fail miserably and have to rip it off and start again. But the more i kept working it with different tools and a whole barrelfull of patience, the better i got at understanding the vinyl and how to process it to get it to what i wanted.
I spent an hour or so every evening for about two weeks to get this done and its fair to say that i enjoyed almost ever minute of it, so i will definitely be attempting something similair again, however, i did learn a couple of things during the process.
Learnings:
Buy a proper vinyl, they are more flexible. This one was the cheapest one i could find anywhere since i was so sure that i would just try this out for fun and have to rip it off i just wanted to try with something cheap. I have since got a few test pieces of better real car vinyls and they work A LOT better on the small pieces i have trid.
The knife is your best friend! Always keep your knife sharp and steady and the results can be amazing, in this scale and with this cheap vinyl it seems that stretching doesn't do a whole lot so being very good at cutting along lines makes the result so much better.
Patience is key. It takes a while and is very fiddly.
Remove anything from the body that can be removed.
Use large chunks where possible and patch with smaller pieces when necessary.
This is at least how i did it, first try with anything like this so next time will probably get better.
Would i recommend this for making a sweet looking little rc car? Nope! Painting is a lot easier, faster and costs probably a third and yields a much better result. But the process is fun and i am not afraid of doing wraps on other stuff after this!
If you want to see a little bit more of the process when doing it i have a short video on it with a few more images on the final result as well: https://youtu.be/DjhO6WeFN3Y
