Vinyl application by John Sugata of JS Design Factory, and Promax Motorsport
Talent by Sasha Singleton and Lisa Kaye
In the October ’10 issue, tagged to the end of the feature of Nao Onishi’s Toda-ITBd and Art Factory-covered RSX Type-S, was a bit about the vinyl installation process we documented on our friend Ken Takahashi’s xB … and a hot photo of our John Sugata, our vinyl designer/installer, with the beautiful Sasha Singleton and Lisa Kaye. While you’ll have to contact John directly to learn the secrets of lady luring, we’re going to show you his master techniques of vinyl design and application.
-
Ken
-
John
Here’s where our story starts: with this cool drawing of a koi fish xB owner Ken decided would look cool slathered on the flanks of his ride, and installer John’s hand-tracing of which parts of it he’ll use for the finished product. More will be going onto Ken’s xB than just this little guy, but we’ll get to that in a few steps.
John begins by scanning a hand trace of the koi drawing into Adobe Illustrator and then adding some personal flare. Here we see the document opened in CASmate Pro, the navigating software that communicates to the machine that will be cutting the vinyl to be applied.
Think of this screen as a “page setup” box when printing a document in Windows. It allows John to identify which sections of the image will be cut—important in situations like ours, when different sections of the image will be cut from different colors of vinyl.
And here's John’s vinyl light-saber: a Graphtec CE5000-50 cutting plotter, seen here loaded with silver vinyl—one of four colors that will go into the final vinyl rendering of the koi.
It’s difficult to see the cuts in the vinyl made by the plotter/cutter unless you’re close up. This machine has the precision to cut thin sheets of vinyl without scoring the paper it’s adhered to. Pretty impressive.
Once the plotter/cutter has done its job, the vinyl is laid across a table and John gets to work separating the vinyl he needs from the excess around it. It’s a tedious job that requires his full attention. And something along the lines of an X-Acto knife.
Of all the shiny, silver vinyl seen leaving the plotter/cutter three steps back, this is all that will be applied to Ken’s xB. Facing up is the non-adhesive side…
…which John covers with adhesive transfer paper, seen here.
Now for the application. John’s first step was to thoroughly clean the side of Ken’s xB where the vinyl will be applied. As you can see he and Ken had already gotten a head start on the project. All those blue lines forming the image of the xBs in the background? We’ll be getting to that soon.