Suggestions Large vinyl installation

You can tile your vinyl for smaller manageable sizes. If you use a ruler and a straight edge you should be able to get it on straight (if not, hire someone who can).

Two bigger concerns would be the opacity of your vinyl and how long it will last over the existing installation. I simply would not cover existing vinyl without a disclaimer of some sort. It is likely to fail in a few months. The new vinyl will put new tensions on the now brittle existing vinyl (the plasticizers have likely migrated out by this time compromising both the vinyl and the adhesive). Also most vinyl will not be opaque enough to block out the old message.

 

Use a vinyl with controltac. You can do it all in one piece pretty easily. I'd print it to match the light blue... then I'd use the top of the blue outline on the truck as a guide. Tack the top left... Tack the top right, make sure every 6-12" is aligned to the top of the blue border... Then just start laying the vinyl down. So long as you don't do it on a super hot day, you should be fine.

Or if you're worried you don't have the skill level to do it, or you want to use really cheap vinyl... Buy a roll of knifeless tape. It's about $20 for 150 FT... You could use the knifeless and follow the line of the border... Laydown vinyl a good 6-10 inches overtop of the border... Pull the tape, and it should be perfectly straight and smooth.

So long as you can lay down vinyl, option #2 would work and would cost you less than a $20 roll to do both sides.

 

Sometimes it's not even about skill. The idea of messing up is nerve racking... Wasting that big piece of vinyl over a tiny mistake and having to start over from scratch. You could do a hundred vinyl wraps a day and have the skill of a veteran pro, but never attempted something like this before.

If you've ever used knifeless it's great for something like this though. Spend the extra time to make sure the knifeless is laid where you'd like your vinyl to end... Double check your measurements to make sure it's straight... Then you can half *** throw the vinyl on-top. So long as you have coverage past the knifeless it's a 30 second pull and it'll look perfectly straight. It'll probably be quicker than doing it the normal way, since you don't have to align a 18 ft Piece.


We do lots of wayfinding projects. Most of them consist of a 12-24" wide stripe following a wall across the whole building..were talking 2-300 ft in the same position on the wall. so putting up stripes like this is easy for us. The most important step is preparation... We spend more time measuring and taping up the vinyl making sure everything looks perfect before we start applying it.

I think using knifeless and aligning to light blue stripe is the quickest and best bet though.