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Sprinter wrap. EBL Events.
Those who are Facebook friends will have seen this a couple of weeks ago but for those who haven’t..
Total nightmare of a job!!
Initially taking the job on at fairly short notice.. and working to a relatively short deadline, it soon went from easy to very difficult and unrealistic. Spent a lot of time stripping all lights, trim, window rubbers, grille, badges, clips, door stops, handles etc etc and cleaning thoroughly, probably almost two days there alone!
The van was ex DHL, sprayed yellow from new but it soon transpired that the paint was shite! Shallow recesses were very tricky, yellow overspray on rubbers made it look like poor trimming, loose lacquer in places, paint runs etc.
In the end , due to heavy workloads, I partially reassembled and took the van to some colleagues to finish the colour change… they’re far more experienced wrappers than I but they still struggled with adhesion on what should be considered pretty easy recesses. Partly due to paint coming away in those recesses.. some 40+hrs! Back doors were wrapped off the vehicle and hinges sprayed black.Anyway, long story short, colour change carried out with oracal 970 ra Matt metallic charcoal, nice material to work with but does seem to need more care when handling than some films, had a couple of tiny cracks appear long after installation and on some fairly flat areas. There will be issues which need addressing in a few months but on the whole the job looks good and the customer was over the moon!!
The digital print is all metamark MD5, and there’s also a bit of oracal 551 in there too. Somewhere in the region of 90 hours accounted for in this job.. not sure I’d take on another in a hurry.. certainly not without a LOT of planning!
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8 Replies
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Great work Hugh, bet your glad to see the back of that job 😉
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Hope you managed to turn a profit on it in the end, very frustrating when a project gets away from you no matter what the reasons are!
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quote Alex Crosbie:Hope you managed to turn a profit on it in the end, very frustrating when a project gets away from you no matter what the reasons are!I think we still made reasonable money as a % of cost, but the stress levels.. not sure there’s a cost you can attribute to that! However, the lessons learned are just as invaluable!
I think in total, the colour change was in the region of £3500 + the sign writing, So it’s not like we lost, there will be a couple of ongoing bits to sort out as the paint causes failure, after explaining to discussing with the customer we chose to leave the small areas to fully fail over a few months, then we should be safe to nip out those failed areas and overlay, thank fully the colour lends itself very well to joins of any kind, barely noticable.
All told, all of us involved would’ve liked to have put out a perfect job but, there’s only so far you can wrap a turd!
H
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Saw this on Facebook Hugh, it looks great :thumbsup:
Agree on the stress factor, it’s not all roses being your own boss at times.
Respect for taking the job on. :claps: Whilst we can wrap, we tend to stick to partial wraps as we found we can make more doing those than full wraps.
BTW we tried the 970RA, very impressed with it, quoted a fleet using it which will keep us busy :shocked:
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Good work Hugh but I understand what you mean when you say the job was stressful. When it’s as time consuming as this one was other jobs and enquiries tend to fall by the wayside which is where I believe you start becoming stressed – I know I do. Just wrapped the rear doors of a van today – took me 5 hours from start to finish – glad I wasn’t wrapping the entire van :awkward:
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That was the biggest issue Phill, I was already busy when I naively agreed to squeeze it in and try to meet their deadlines, i did most of my other work but ultimately had to take it to some colleagues who luckily had a slot become available through vehicles being delayed on the continent! trying to work around my usual day and stil get it all done meant numerous late nights, very little sleep and as a result.. mountains of stressing over it!
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Nice Job Hugh! At least you can learn from the job with the time it takes and prepare in future if you have a similar job arise… and a few more £’s if it could be another nightmare.
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Nice job Hugh, saw it on FB too :thumbsup:
Ultimately it’s a good exercise but I’ve found these jobs don’t pay enough to cover the amount of work, hassle and sleepless nights!! If you’re wrapping day in day out then you build up speed and know how but give it a couple of months and you’ll have forgotten all the tricks you learnt on this job! :rollseyes:
That said you did a great job and I hope your customer heaped praise on you for it! :claps:
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