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Wheelcover graphics: john maplethorpe
Heres a way to make a few quid, covers for spare wheels on 4×4’s are mostly unused but are a good place for signage and they don’t have to be just boring old text, you can make as much of them as you wish, they are available from either http://www.wheelcover.com or victory-design.co.uk for about 30 quid, design them up and I sell them for around £110, if this sounds expensive to buy a replacement one from a dealer with the dealers name and adress on costs about the same.
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17 Replies
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Steve,
These are great! what vinyl do you use to put on them? Just normal vinyl eg Mactac 9800,…?
Gav
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Steve – what a fabulous array of wheelcover designs…
The Maplethorpe one looks even more impressive in real life – so I can only imagine how great some of the others looked when made-up!!!
My eye is particularly drawn to the dreamscapes one…was that cut vinyl or printed? – it’s beautiful!
Great idea, very reasonable prices and some great examples too – more please. 😉
more soon
mikethesign
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Gav, yup ordinary vinyl but the covers are the ones with the hard plastics discs not the soft all vinyl ones.
😳 Thanks Mike, the Dreamscapes one is all vinyl, I did it soon after reading your demo for the Parker van? Dave Westhall, is the bloke that owns Dreamscapes, gave me a few photies of his work and this is just a section of a japanese garden that he did for someone. Pity he’s only got a 4×4 as it would look great on a van, I told him if you buy a van mahe sure its a dark colour 😆 -
excellent stuff mate as usual…
great samples if printed on nice glossy paper and shown to potential customers.hope paddy sees this post.. he is working on something along these lines for his website. this should inspire him 😉
thanks for showing (hot)
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We supply wheelcovers to a few of the local garages, talk to Mr cutler, cant remember his christian name, at wheelcover.com.
They are no longer making the semi rigid advanced which was the floppy cover with an extra layer of plastic sewn in the inside. They are now pushing the hard versions only.
We have batches of covers screen printed for garages in multiples of 25, they charge £2 per colour for the screening. They then keep the disks on the shelf and we order them off one at a time when they are needed. All the central sections on the covers are the same, its only the depth of the “skirt” that is unique to the finished sizes. So instead of a garage buying them in lots of 25 or 50 direct from others I sell them one at a time saving them the tock costs. I make the dealer pay the print up front with original order and so I am not even out of pocket with that.
I only make £25 per cover in profit but this puts you in the dealers vendor list and they usually shout for any other graphics or clients logos etc they need after. When the dealers I work with sell a vehicle on they will give my details to the new owner to contact for livery. Very handy if the sell small vans etc.
Its probably no interest to the larger guys on here but all us one man bands can find this type of thing really helpful as its year long business.
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Nice work Steve my favorite is the dreamscapes I woud be looking for a couple of hundred for a job of that quality what did you get for it if you dont mind me asking.
Neil……
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Great work Steve,
I’ve recently done 3 covers all from our man Fred and have had a problem with the vinyl bubbling up after about three weeks.
The odd thing is they were fine when they left my workshop!I spoke to Fred at wheelcover and he did’nt have an answer although he was helpful. I used 651 vinyl. He did mention something about gases being released by the plastic.
Yours look great though, What about a demo of the Dreamscapes one for the site.
Cheers
Johnny S 😀
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Blo*dy marvelous!
We knock out simple 1 colour (normally white on black) covers with some arched text and perhaps a simple clipart. Now I want to do work like that…
We buy our covers from Grafityp, they are only £20 for matt finish and £22 I think for gloss. I’d allways go gloss but I bought some in in matt by mistake, one more to go then we’re back to gloss! We charge £65+VAT for a one colour and then add £10 for additional colours. Mike and I dicussed the price and I’d like to charge more but I made a wheelcover for my discovery which has a star with ‘A wheelcover like this only £65+VAT’ so with that the price was set. If I could design wonderful creations like yours then I could easily charge more.
I think Stuart has given me some inspiration/motivation to market the wheelcover side of the business again.
Thanks guys
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Here are a few examples of my work, the wales one sold at £85 but should have gone for a bit more I think. It was my first and I now realise it took a bit longer than I priced.
I use banner vinyl on the type of covers I buy because although they are hard plastic they are still pretty flexible.
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heres the other one
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Paddy,
If I understand correctly banner vinyl isn’t a material chosen for it’s flexibility, but for the type of adhesive used. I recall somewhere on the boards a very good explanation of why use banner vinyl and it’s a matter of the high quantity of palsticiser gasses emitted by the vinyl banner material. These plasticisers are the solvents used to form the plastic and we know them or some of them as the smell of new plastic. The emmision of plasticisers is much lower in hard plastics I think???
You may be using banner vinyl uneccesarily and besides once in place the wheel cover barely moves?
On a vaguely related topic, we applied a design to some bananna banner using oracle 651. Unhappy with the design/applicatio/layout the vinly was removed. The sticky residue remained and that piece of banner seems to be uncleanable, it appears that the glossy surface has gone???? We made a new one but I have this piece of Banner that I’d like to clean and use, any ideas?
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I had to alter a banner last week, a date change for a local charity.
I used some FLuxclene which is actually Printed cct board cleaner that I had knocking around. It is excellent for cleaning off glue and dirt residues and I havnt found any materials that it damages as yet. It is available from RS i had some knocking around from a previous generous employer 😆 -
Use the circular text tool instead of the distort tool.
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cheers Jon, I do use a circular tool now, still getting the hang of things.
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Jon,
After getting rather frustrated, we have now stopped using the circular text tool in favour of the distortions circle. If you guys are using VMP like us then I think you’ll find that the kerning gets right stuffed up if you use the circular text tool. The distortions circle works great providing you start with the right sized text, convert to curves and then set the distortions circle to the right size over your wheelcover template.
Additionally VMP can lose your selected font in the circular text tool, leaving you with Arial when you open the job at a later date. Don’t know why, we just concluded that the circular text tool needs to be improved. If you’re not using VMP then kindly disregard my comments.
Ramjam
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Easy solution to that Ramjam, don’t use it, notice on my 6 designs I’ve only used it twice and that was only for phone no.s, you see so many names curved round the top and phone number round the bottom and a ruddy great hole in the middle, just because the substrates round doesn’t mean you have to have the image the same too.
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I’ve just cut some vinyl for a wheelcover on our flatbed router as our cutter is quite small. I used a quickly knocked together holder for a blade cartridge in place of the router motor and an MDF vacuum table for hold down.
Any tips for getting the vinyl central to the wheelcover ?
Is it best to apply the vinyl dry or wet ?Regards,
Rab
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