For the past three years, we have been working closely with the administration of Falls Baptist Church/College in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. We have done design work, we have applied cut graphics to vans and created banners for special events. When they mentioned that they might have something rather large coming in for a complete wrap, we really didn’t know what to expect.
Our customer has been designing for the church and the college for the last few years but had never tackled anything too large. So when he sent over the art file we were rather surprised. The 53′ Trail Liner passenger bus was a monster. The story behind how they came to acquire the bus is an example of faith. Check out their story at The Bus. We have tackled some large projects before but this was truly eye opening.
The art file alone was over 50 meg! We started by pulling apart the art file to see if there were any defects that would affect printing a wrap that required over 1000 square feet of vinyl. After refining the design and running the design through a color correction program that we use to ensure that the colors are as vibrant as the customer expected, we began the lengthy process of ripping the design into panels to print. The rip process took just over 4 hours!
Printing a job of this size and maintaining the alignment and color across all the panels took a great deal of attention. We started printing the wrap on a Wednesday morning and finished on Thursday afternoon. A quick 8 hours to laminate the print and trim the panels, and we were ready for the bus.
The bus arrived at 8am and by 830 we were pressure washing the surface of the bus. This helped us remove almost 30% of the vinyl on the bus. The prior buses owner uses a reflective vinyl for all of their buses. Reflective vinyl is downright nasty to try to remove, especially after 7 years. After we pressure washed the entire bus, we moved on to eraser wheels. An eraser wheel is a very efficient way to remove vinyl, the only drawback is that it leaves behind a massive mess. The surface of the bus was covered in a sticky, yellow paste. We spent almost 30 hours removing the old vinyl. Once the vinyl was gone, we came back with the pressure washer. A good bath and this beast was ready for adhesive remover and a plastic razor. We followed up with an adhesive remover and a number of plastic razor blades to carefully scrape the remaining adhesive off the fiberglass surface. It was so nice to complete the clean-up except we weren’t done. We finished off by wiping down every surface with isopropyl alcohol. This finishing step ensures that we have a perfect surface to adhere the new wrap to.
The installation of the wrap took four team members two days to complete the installation. Each panel was hand cut and post install heated with a torch to guarantee that the wrap wouldn’t come up until the church was ready to replace the wrap. If you have a commercial bus that you want to wrap please give us a call at Optimum Signs. We can be reached at info@optimumsignswi.com or 262.289.9481.
