Honda Civic Si

Do-It-Yourself Vehicle Wrap, It's Not As Hard As You Think.Vehicle wraps are something that hasn't quite come around yet. Occasionally you'll see an Escalade with some new rapper's grill plastered across the side. A few high dollar race teams use them, but even in pro-racing they are pretty uncommon. Most people don't even consider wrapping their cars due to unfamiliarity with the process, overwhelming costs and lets face it, they're not for everyone. Most street cars with low budget wraps would make those mail order flaming dragon stickers look clean by comparison, but wrapping the car yourself is something that people with race cars might want to consider.

Race cars need to standout. If you are stuck with a teal Civic, no matter how many stickers you put on it, you will always be that amateur racer with the teal Civic. The same pretty much goes with any other factory paint job. No sponsor really wants to be on some car that looks like every other car at the track. But getting a custom paint job is expensive and maintaining it can be impossible.

Traditionally, wraps have cost even more. Typically by the time the car has been 3D modeled, the artwork is created, the material is printed and the wrap is installed, you're looking at $3,500 or more. But with a little creativity and a lot of elbow grease, you can have a car that looks like it just rolled out of a $250,000 transporter, for around $1,000.

For this project, we took a relatively plain looking silver Civic Si and gave it a complete makeover. We cut a few corners and ended up with a body that really turned heads for less than a grand.

		To start, we completely skipped the 3D modeling stage and just went with some artwork that was sketched on a piece of paper. Our good friend Larry knocked out this robot race team in about an hour or so.
This is the machine printing the artwork. The guys at Ordway were mad because the simple sketches didn't begin to show-off the capability of the full color printer. The printing took close to eight hours. When you get your estimate on material and printing costs, don't think you're getting hosed when they charge you for this. Time is money and the machines aren't cheap either.	Next, we headed over to Ordway Sign Supply in Van Nuys, Calif., where the sketch was scanned and re-sized. We had some basic measurements of the car and sort of guessed at how big to print everything. This worked out well on the hood and passenger side, but we blew it on the driver side where the robots got their heads chopped off by the windows. After enlarging the image there were a lot of spots and blemishes in the background. We could have cleaned it up before printing, but leaving them in saved time and left a cool textured comic book look to the entire wrap.	Here, Pete Ordway and Tim Benson are laminating the printed vinyl. This process protects the ink and creates a glossy finish. Pete wanted to express that they don't normally do printing for customers. They are in the business of selling the machines and materials. But, if you want to have this done you can call and ask for Tim. He'll help find one of their customers in your area that can help you. Be sure to tell Tim he looks goofy in this picture.
We think the professionals install the vinyl in full sheets. Cutting it into smaller pieces to fit the body panels seemed to work pretty good for us though. After removing the backing paper we sprayed down the back of the vinyl, then we sprayed the surface of the car with water mixed with a hint of soap.	The fuzzy Mactac squeegee flattens out and presses down the hot vinyl without scratching it. It also helps to keep you from burning your fingertips, a little bit anyway. The radiant heat from the gun still burns pretty good though. Next time we'll wear mechanics gloves. Too bad we didn't think of that sooner.	Once the vinyl gets hot enough it can stretch around just about any contour. We found that heating and pressing the vinyl down to the flat surfaces first helped maintain the shape of the image. Once that was down we would really put the heat to it and stretch the material into the contours and pockets.
The vinyl does not stick until heat is applied. Once it gets hot enough, it shrinks down to fit. A careful trim with a razor, a lot of heat and a little pressure would cause it to tuck around the edges and stay down nicely.	The corner of the car required that the vinyl be trimmed and overlapped somewhat. We trimmed along the top edge of the robot's arm and shifted it toward his waist. The torso also came out a little bit shifted, but once heat was applied and everything was pressed down it came out looking surprisingly good.	The door handles were removed and then wrapped separately so that they could still function.
The tire changer robot on the fender had to be cut out and shifted to fit on the car better. If you use a constant color on the background it gives you a lot of leeway to adjust things so they sit right. Then the leftover background scraps can be used to fill in the corners and roofline.	After approximately 20 hours of labor, the wrap was complete. We had a look that few painters could ever do and not a hint of overspray.	Out on the track nobody will see any wrinkles. That is unless you stuff the car into a wall or another car. In which case sections of the vinyl can be reprinted and applied to new body panels. To a racer, the ability to reproduce perfectly color-matched and sized body panels could be the wrap's greatest advantage of all.
The sponsor logos were sized, cut and installed after the wrap went on. They could have been printed straight onto the vinyl but getting everything to fit right would have been impossible with our primitive method of designing the wrap. They also wouldn't have come out looking as sharp. The blue masking tape is used to size the stickers so that everything fits just right.	If you look closely you can see some wrinkles down on the bottom of the bumper. This section of the car was rushed and unfortunately it shows.	The shoes make the man. For the mere cost of a can of paint and Gwan's '03 Motorcycle Buyers Guide we had the final touch to really make the car standout.