Wascamp,

I brainstormed with a graphic artist friend of mine and we came up with this design. Admittedly it's mostly his work, but I'm still pretty proud of it. The red is a monocote and the blue and yellow are utracote. Both the red and blue were cut on a laser then transfered and painstakingly ironed onto the yellow base. Not an easy task, and had a couple of hairy moments, but all worked out well.

The biggest problem with doing this kind of a graphic is getting either monocote or ultracote to adhere nicely to the previous layer without leaving all kinds of bubbles behind. Then there is the problem of tinted glue leaching out at the edges of the graphic if you heat it up too much. I found I was able to use a lot of elbow grease and Spray 9 to remove most of the glue residues. I found that once I had everything looking good and all bubbles worked out, it wasn't yet as stable as it looked. The first time it sat outside in the full sunlight for the day at the airfield, the top layer started to show up some bubbles and wrinkles. I've since smoothed those out and don't seem to have anymore problems.

Graphics like these make me want to try my hand at a painted surface. Much easier to work with in many ways. Especially if you can get a template laser cut. I remember seing some other threads with good ideas for glueing on laser cut paper templates with 3m spray adhesive. Going to have to give that a whirl one day.

The graphics that I'm designing myself for the Tri-Pacer is far from traditional, so may not win too many ooohs and aaaaahs from the tripe lovers, but oh well. I build for me!

Once I get them cut out and ironed on I'll send you some photos if you like.