38D, er, 19C1, and I finished creating and applying our race cars' graphics today. See the attached for the results.

GTC Cup Graphics

 

Looking good! great job....

 

+1

 

Nice, I can't wait to see these cars together for the magazine article.

 

Very nice - how many hours did that take per car?

 

Charlie, your car looks sweet! And Colin, well if I knew that the razzberry car could have looked like that, I still would have passed!

Good luck in GTC1!

 

Those look great, I hope they are both out at Road America so I can get some good shots of them the Cranberry always photographs well. Right now I have TRAC penciled in as an event I'll shoot unless someone ponies up money up front.

 

beautiful job!

 

You two are something else...those cars look great. If you guys keep this up you'll have all 964 cups in existance running PCA. Ditto on how many hours did it take? Did you guys do paper mockups first?

Great job Dr. and 38D

 

I'll second that...

The cars do look great! And it's neat to get them back to their original (or in 38D's case, ALMOST original) livery!

 

Cooleyjb, Colin and I both plan to be at Road America over Labor Day. We wouldn't miss that event! I ran with a plain blue hood last year in anticipation of the full livery and I look forward to on-track pictures of the car in its "correct" look!

As for the amount of time, keep in mind both Colin and I have day jobs that have nothing to do with graphics...

Average working hours per car I estimate to be about 40 (what do you think, Colin?). Total duration for the two cars was ~5 weeks (e.g., the 40 hours per car were spread over 5 weeks). My car took more time than Colin's (more graphics to draw and apply), but that's probably the average between the two. Since we worked together the past 2.5 days, there are no doubt some synergies in that number which would be lost if one was working alone. The steps in the process are:

1) Obtain pictures and examples of livery. My car is a recreation of its original '93 Supercup livery so I needed pics, etc., to know what I was making.

2) Create artwork on the computer. This takes time, skill, and the right equipment. If I was to do up another 964 Cup, the time we spent in this "phase" could be reduced as I now have a lot of the "common" graphics drawn up (e.g., Pirelli, Supercup number box, etc).

3) Cut the vinyl.

4) "Weed" the vinyl. This is the process of removing the "negative image" from the vinyl cut sheet. This step takes some skill and time, particularly for smaller artwork such as the text under the "PPV Prechtl" on Colin's car. Make a mistake in this step and you're back to step #3.

5) Mask the vinyl. This isn't hard or particularly time consuming, but it is a very important step and if you make a mistake here, you return to step #3.

6) Apply the vinyl. Steps for this include prepping the car surface, measuring/aligning, and applying. Large sheets can be tricky to do right, particularly when working around contours (which the 911 has a lot of! ). Any mistake in this step, you return to step #3...

Breakdown of time by steps for these cars:

1-2: ~40%
3-5: ~15%
6: ~45%

I have no idea what guys who do this every day charge, but assuming $80/hour, the work on these cars was the equivalent of ~$3200 each not including material.

Anyone paid to have their car done by a pro? How do these numbers compare?

 

Did you put the vinyl down dry? I am about to undertake a similiar but much easier project and I wondered whether you could float the vinyl into place and squeegee out the water/air. I know the vinyl I used before was stuck once it went down. Since I down't own the vinyl cutter, I cannot afford to make a mistake.

 

I would say even more. I spent north of 30 hours just drawing the vector graphics. Some of these were common images like the Johnson Matthey, Pagid, Shell Logo, and Recaro. And some were unique to our two cars like the Obermaier. So in total I think I spent ~55 hours just on my car. I would guess that Charlie's was more like 65. Both times would have been ~8-10 hours higher had we not had the common graphic reuse. If we did it again, I think I could do the whole process in more like 40-45 hours for my car, as I am just faster at all the steps now.

Having 2 people for steps 3-6 made things much easier. While we both got quite skilled at doing the various steps, there were time where 2 sets of hands just made things easier. On example was applying charlie's blue field on his hood. Doing that large of a piece is very difficult by yourself!

All in all, I am very happy how both cars look. It was a fun, though time consuming, project.

 

Vinyl down wet.

 

Great job guys.