Do-it-Yourself Vinyl Graphics

By Kevin Morrison

Ever since I got my Red ’94 R-package back in mid ’97, I’ve been contemplating putting racing stripes on the car. It just seemed like the right thing to do. Unfortunately, fear of unwanted attention on the road, and pooh-poohing by friends and loved ones caused me to hesitate for almost 18 months. Finally this winter (as much of a winter as we have here in central-Florida) I decided I could not put it off any longer. I knew from many hours of playing with "The Stripe Machine" on the internet that I wanted two big white stripes running from stem to stern. No little skinny, offset, delicate stripes for my Red Roadster. I wanted to do the Full Monty.

So I got on the computer and dialed up the web site of M Roadster Performance USA, owned by Dan Pedroza of Austin, Texas, and ordered up a roll of white 3M Control-Tac Vinyl, eight inches wide, and long enough to make the trip from nose to tail no less than twice. Just for good measure, and to give me something to look at while I’m inside the car, I also ordered a set of polished aluminum vent trim rings. These little jewels go around the dash eyeball vents and give the interior of the car a gleam and glimmer rivaled only by that of my polished Voodoo shift knob and brake lever handle. The transformation from coal-bin to diamond mine is complete.

The weekend of the installation was anticipated and celebrated. It seemed to me to be a monumental event in the life of my car. It finally got the stripes it deserves, but it required about five hours of hard work on my part. I had intended to enlist the help of some fellow Miata club members in the installation, but the weekend after the stripes arrived, they were involved with other trivial issues, like replacing a clutch and installing new shocks and springs. So I resolved to undertake the impossible task on my own. To my great surprise and joy, it turns out not to be an impossible task, just a really tedious one. The instructions that come with the M Roadster stripes are excellent - very practical and straightforward. Without them I would no doubt have wasted the majority of the vinyl and possibly never have gotten it right. Beyond the instructions, I had been mentally preparing for the task for quite some time. At the annual gathering of Miatas at Deal’s Gap in North Carolina, where you can’t swing a cat without hitting a Miata with stripes on it, I had taken a lot of mental notes about where to put seams and other small details that aren’t readily apparent to the casual observer. The first issue I had to deal with was the space between the stripes. It has been a long-held belief of mine that a wider space is better, so I decided to make mine 1.5 inches (38.1mm) wide. The space was maintained using 1.5 inch painter’s tape, which is designed to be easy to remove (though maybe a little too easy, especially when you get them wet).

The process begins with measuring a section of vinyl to cover a section of car. I decided to start with the biggest sections, on the hood (the bonnet if you are not in North America). The basic method is to soak down the sticky side of the vinyl and the surface of the car with soapy water. I purchased a hand-held spray bottle expressly for this purpose. The big stripes on the hood are actually pretty easy; you don’t have to do too much coaxing to get the vinyl to do what you want. I did get some large-ish bubbles on the first one I did, and I decided that if they didn’t cure out by themselves, I’d just redo that one section with some leftover vinyl. It took several weeks, but the bubbles went away all by themselves. The bubbles resulted from me not getting enough soapy water on the car and on the stripe before I put it down, so I couldn’t work them out. You have to really soak the area to be covered and then soak the sticky side of the stripe as you peel it off the backing. The vinyl absolutely will not stick to the car as long as the surface stays wet. After you apply the stripe, you start working the water out with your hand and a sponge, and eventually it sticks where you want it. You can still move the stripe around a little for quite some time (hours) after you apply it. This can also be a source of frustration, as every time I’d get the stripe in just the right place, I’d hit it with the sponge again to work on a bubble and it would move. This went on for 20 or 30 minutes for each section of stripe.

The really hard parts were the front bumper area and the top of the rear bumper. For the front, I had to put a seam in the little groove and then try to run the stripe up under the top of the mouth, which it didn’t want to do. The rear bumper was done in 3 pieces, with a seam in the groove (which was a royal pain) and another one right at the curve that goes down to the bottom (mine butts right up to the rear air dam). The rear center brake light was pretty easy to trim around, with a very sharp x-acto knife. I started to use a piece on either side of the license plate panel, but it was way too much trouble to deal with the emblems and to trim around the recess where the plate resides. It looks better without it there. I also left the rear lip spoiler unstriped. The stripes run right up under the spoiler, so it looks really clean, and I didn’t want to screw that up by trying to cover the spoiler which would have required a seam and some fancy trimming around the top of the brake light. At first, I thought the spoiler should be striped, but I’d rather leave it undone than have imperfections in such an obvious place. It does look a little different, which is a Good Thing. Now that I’ve lived with it for a while, I have no intention of going back to apply the stripe to the lip spoiler. I like it the way it is.

The decklid was pretty easy, and I even did it in near darkness as night fell while I worked. The last part I did was the little space at the top of the windshield header, which was tricky until I figured out how to lift up the stripping around the windshield a tiny bit and slide the edge of the vinyl up under it. That gives it a perfect edge. The other edge is almost perfect, but not quite because it had to be trimmed with the x-acto knife. Some have questioned the presence of the stripe at the top of the windshield header, since it seems quite detached from the rest of the car, but one must consider that if the car had a hardtop, the stripe would run continuously from the header, over the top, and onto the decklid. In that context it is correct, and I decided to do it that way, even though I do not own a hardtop.
Another tricky spot was trimming a tiny bit around the windshield washer squirty things. This would not have been necessary if I had used a 1-inch gap between the stripes, but the 1.5 inch gap made the stripes just touch the squirty things. It turned out fine though. Even I cannot see my butchery unless I look very closely. Trimming around the toilet seat/big zit on the nose of the car was not too hard, but if one looked closely at my work, the imperfection would be apparent. I may redo that part, because it is in a very obvious location. This Red Roadster now looks like a completely different car and definitely feels faster from the driver’s seat. I’d say the stripes are worth a good 30 eyeball-horsepower, which, combined with the Voodoo knob and handle, gives my car at least 50 extra horsepower without the engine even running!