Project Wrap

As my Suzuki RF600 had some crash damage when I bought it, for the bargain price of £670, I have been wondering what to do to tidy it up.
The bike came with the parts needed to repair the crash damage, only they were the wrong colour...

My original plan was just to paint the replacement parts to match, but as the bike is 17 years old the original pannels will have faded and a colour match would be difficult.

So my plan then moved to a complete re-spray. Too expensive to have done professionally and too messy to do at home.

Then I had a moment of genius, how about a vinyl wrap? It's something that the 'modding' community has been doing on cars for a few years, so I did a bit of research. There are loads of instructional videos on YouTube, some good, some bad, but in general it looked easy.

Vinyl is basically sticky backed plastic which becomes more malliable with a little heat applied so that you can work it round shapes. The cheapest form in a large enough size is signwriter's vinyl. I picked up a 5 meter roll about 1.5 meters wide in matt black for £30.

It turns out the pro's make it look easy! My first go wasted quite a bit of vinyl which ended up in a big crumpled ball.
My second attempt wasted a slightly smaller quantity of vinyl as it pulled paint from a damaged surface. The pro's all agree on the fact that the painted surface should be flawless and now I know why. Repeatedly peeling off to re-position and smooth out the vinyl will easily pull off paint and laquer. Also any imperfections in the surface will show through the thin vinyl.

Some pro's reccomend using water on the surface to prevent the vinyl sticking too hard when initially positioning and to make bubble removal easier. I tried this, but the water made the glue on the back not at all sticky...
I am using cheap vinyl though. The professional stuff is gas permiable which means bubbles can be 'pressed' out easily. The stuff I'm using, the bubbles need to be pricked and believe me bubbles are unavoidable!

The finish I am getting is not perfect, but the surface I'm working on is less than perfect. So long as the finished result looks good from a few feet away then I will be happy.