(country music)
- How do you paint stripes and decals on a car?
If you ever wondered that,
well we're gonna show you in this video.
(tires screeching)
Hey Youtube, this is Donny Smith
and welcome to another Eastwood video series.
This is the video series where we're taking the mustang
from start to finish, step-by-step.
And now we've got the car painted.
we've got the base coat on,
and now we're gonna apply some decals and stripes.
Now stripes and decals, any type of custom painting,
it's time consuming, takes a lot of masking.
This video was a little bit long.
I sped it up, but I did still keep
all the footage in there so you can see step-by-step
the steps we took on this mustang to get it painted.
If you remember a previous video,
before we stripped it all down and got all the decals off,
it had a decal and some stripes on the bottom.
It said mustang.
Before we stripped those off, took the decals off,
we made that template out of paper.
We used some masking paper and used some charcoal
to highlight the lettering and stripes,
and that gives a couple options.
We'd have something to hand mask if we want to do that,
but what we did is we took that
and took it to a graphics company
and they made us a stencil out of that.
It's about the same thing as a decal,
except where the stripe is gonna be with this,
that's where the red paint is going to go,
and a decal would kind of be the opposite
of that, the reverse of that.
So if you're gonna do that, be sure to explain
to the graphics company what you are doing
and they can help you out from there.
And another thing, you might also mention
that if they have a less tacky vinyl tape,
so it doesn't stick quite as good as the regular decals do,
because you want to be able to get this
and peel it off when you're done
doing your stripes and everything.
When working with stripes and decals like this,
not necessarily pinstripes, but decals,
put them up there ...
We have some guidelines, areas that we're going by
like the body lines where we're lining it up,
but you want to make sure it fits right
because if you don't, however you put it on,
that's how it's going to be after you mask it,
so you want to make sure it's right.
But what we're doing here, and you can't really see it
because the camera angle is kind of bad,
but I have a spray bottle with some water,
and I'll do this with decals too
if it's the vinyl stick-on decals,
but I'm gonna spray the back of this,
and this will allow you to put it on there.
And if something's not quite right
you can still pull it off.
If you don't do that getting it on and off,
if you have to pull it off and realign it
that can mess your stripes up.
So we did that.
We've got the stripe on there,
making sure everything's aligned right.
And we want to do this before
we start squeegeeing it on there.
So as you can see we did have to pull
it back and forth a couple of times.
And I'm gonna step back.
You want to make sure everything's right,
and once it is then you can start pushing it down,
making sure that it's pressed up against the car good.
Looking at some reference points from different sides,
making sure everything is the way it's supposed to be.
So we're starting to push it down,
and once we get it pushed down
really good we can get a squeegee.
Or we use one of your body filler spreaders,
that will work, a credit card, anything.
It's much like window tint, you're gonna start
pressing out all the bubbles,
any water that may be left under there.
You're just gonna basically squeegee that out.
And you kind of start from the center,
just like with window tint, and work outwards,
and that way you don't have any bubbles
that get trapped in the center area.
This method has always worked well for me.
There may be other ways to do it,
this is just the way I do it.
Now if it's a pinstripe, something small like that,
I don't use water for something smaller.
But anything big, even if it's a decal
that's going to stay on the car,
I will do this, squeegee it on,
and then when it dries it's going to stick on really good.
Just like window tint, it sticks really good.
Before we go any further I wanted to talk
about these stripes just a little bit.
In this photo here we are pulling the backing off,
and then we can apply the water
to the decal and then apply it to the car,
but what I want to talk about, what I want you to notice
in this photo, is the different stripes in this stencil.
Whenever we made this, when we took it
to the graphics company, we had them put
additional stripes on there, just so it would
give us options, because we wasn't sure at the time
what we wanted to do, if we wanted to have multiple
stripes above the main red stripe, or just one.
So we went ahead and put multiple stripes on there.
It would give us some type of options like these right here.
Now this is just some cheesy graphics
I did on the computer, and I am not a computer guru,
but it will give you the idea of what I'm talking about.
So we had different stripes above
the main stripe in case we wanted ...
If you look at the top one, it has two stripes
above the main stripe, two red stripes.
The second one has one, the third one don't have any.
But anyway, this gives us all the options.
We could do a number of things.
So we wanted to have that option
so whenever we dropped them off we had them do that.
Now we ended up picking the middle one,
which is the original one.
If you remember the original decals
that is what it looked like
and that's what we're gonna go with.
Okay, back to installing these decals.
We're gonna to the same thing over here.
We're peeling the backing off,
we're gonna apply water to the back side,
and then we're gonna apply it to the car.
Make sure that it's lined up right,
that it's the same on both sides
and it's not at an angle or crooked or anything like that.
Because like I said, once you get this mask off
and paint it on it's there to stay.
It's going to be there for forever.
Getting it squeegeed out, all the bubbles out of this side,
just like we did the other side.
Make sure all of the bubbles and water is out.
Now we went back to the other side.
Notice we let it dry for a little bit.
Set up so the letters and the striping would stay there,
the ones that we wanted to stick on there,
so we allowed it to dry a little bit
and now we're pulling it all off
and it's just going to leave
the stripes that it's supposed to.
It's going to leave the outline of the mustang
and the outline of the stripes we're gonna paint on there.
So we're taking it off.
Now the stripes, the vinyl, is black,
that's left on the car, so you really can't see
what it looks like because it matches the car.
But they are on there right now.
And also, even after you pull that off
you want to make sure that the vinyl is on there,
it hasn't peeled up anywhere.
If there's any problems take care of it,
because if you've got an edge or something
that's loose, that paint's gonna seep through
and it's not going to look good.
It's going to look horrible if you have a real fuzzy line,
or some of the red paint gets where the black should be.
You can fix that before you clear coat it.
You can go back and sand it a little bit
and spot, you can spot paint if you have to,
but it's best just to try to make sure
you don't have to do that in the first place.
So now we're just outlining that stripe.
We're going back to the edge of that tape,
that vinyl tape, which you can't see it,
and we're just applying masking tape,
and that's just going to give us something
to mask to whenever we put the paper on,
because we're gonna apply masking paper
beyond that point, because we don't want
to get any over-spray on the car.
That's the worst thing.
You won't get it clear-coated and not notice until the end,
and then notice that there was some
red over-spray that got on the black.
That's something we want to avoid.
Any type of ...
Especially stripes, but any type of painting, really,
on an automotive, there's a lot of masking.
But especially with stripes and custom painting,
there's so much masking.
There's a lot of masking.
And then the spray time used on these little stripes,
and it doesn't take too long.
And remember, take your time during this stage.
I know masking is kind of tedious,
but however it looks when it's masked off,
however good of a job you do, that is exactly
what it's going to look like when you're done.
Now what I'm doing here, I'm using a special tape.
This is made by 3M Scotch.
But it's a pull-out tape.
And you apply it, and then it has like five strips
for a choice that you can pull out.
There's different ones depending on how wide
you want the stripe, or if you want two stripes
by each other, you can pull that strip out.
It's pretty neat tape.
Works real well for pinstripes.
Notice we didn't use the water on this,
we just applied it on there.
But we're also going down the car and we're applying it.
Now we're not sticking it down hard yet,
we still want to be able to pull the tape up
and adjust if we need to.
Then once we have it on there,
then we can pull the strips out that we want,
where we want the red paint to make the pinstripes at.
So you can see we're looking at it,
and that's very important.
Really look at it and make sure
that it looks right, that it's what you want,
because if not, it's going to look
odd when you unmask everything.
You're gonna see a crooked pinstripe or something like that.
So go around the car, make sure it looks right,
look at it from angles, stand back,
and then once you're happy with it
then you can go around and push it down good and tight
because you don't want it loose anywhere
because that will allow the red paint to seep under
and that will look horrible to have a fuzzy line
where paint had got under the tape.
So once you got it there, you push it down really good
and pull the strips, and you are ready.
Then you're gonna do the same thing.
That's what he's doing here, he's pushing it down.
But you're gonna do the same thing as with the lower stripe.
Then you're gonna mask, we're gonna outline it
with some tape and then mask with masking paper
above and below that line.
This might seem like a lot of work,
I mean it is time-consuming, but I think
it looks so much better to have these painted on
rather than the vinyl that you buy for these.
And now she is pulling off the pull-outs,
the strips that we want to get painted.
That's where we want the pinstripe at.
And she's pulling those out, she's pulling two of them out
because she wants a double pinstripe,
and we're gonna pull those out.
And now, like I said, I'm gonna mask this.
Now, one thing you may notice in here,
we're not wearing gloves, and that's because
it is so hard to do all this type of masking with gloves.
It is for me, I've tried it.
It would be better not to contaminate the surface,
but we're gonna go around and we're gonna wipe
it down really good, and make sure that
there's no contaminates on there
so we don't have anything from our hands on there.
It's best not to touch the surface,
but in a case like this the tape sticks to my gloves.
It just becomes a mess.
And I would also like to mention
to be sure and read your technical datasheet
because every paint has a window.
That's how long you have to re-coat that
without having to sand it.
If you go past, let's say it's a 24 hour window,
and you have not put your paint, your stripes,
your clear-coat, whatever you're gonna be putting on there,
within that time, you're gonna have to sand it
to provide that mechanical adhesion.
So once we have this all masked off
and the stripes are ready to be sprayed,
we're gonna wipe it down just to make sure
we removed any contaminates, and then we
can spray straight on top of that.
We don't have to sand.
And then once we're done with that we'll unmask everything
and of course wipe it down again.
Get it ready.
And then we can apply our clear-coat
and we'll never have to sand anything.
Now if you wait too long, past that window,
you're gonna have to sand to provide
that mechanical adhesion.
Now we're getting close.
About got this masked off, just making sure
all the areas that we don't want red on
is masked off so we don't get any over-spray.
And you also want to make sure ...
Go back around all your tape edges,
any seems that you may have, to make sure ...
Like right there, put some down,
make sure that there's no gaps where over-spray
can get in, because that's the last thing we want
is to get over-spray on here
and not notice it, or have to sand it off.
Just eliminate all that.
Now we've finally got it ready
and we are putting some red on.
The stripes are gonna be red
and we're getting that sprayed on.
Put a coat on this side, and the back,
then we'll get the other side.
And it just kind of depends.
You can tell how much.
Like that was kind of light right there.
Probably should have put it on a little heavier,
but you can kind of tell by the paper.
Whenever the paper looks saturated or really red
then you know that the stripe is gonna be dark enough,
because you want to make sure that you got full hiding.
And again, with all of these, check your flash times.
You need to wait in between coats whatever is recommended.
You don't want to just spray.
I might have edited some of this out here.
I put just about everything in these videos,
just so you can see everything.
But if there's just dead time I'll try to take that out.
Wait your flash times.
You don't want to rush to this point.
And once you see full hiding, stop.
The less buildup on those stripe edges
the better off you'll be.
But you want to make sure you do receive full hiding though.
So we're going around getting those sprayed,
and we are just about done with this.
It's kind of crazy.
So much masking just for such little paint time,
but it's gonna look awesome.
I hope you enjoyed this video.
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If you have any comments or questions
be sure and leave them below.
That wraps up this video.
In the next one we'll start clear-coating
this car and we're gonna finally get it done.
Take care and we'll see you in the next video.
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