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Is vinyl better than paint?

iaw4

Well Known Member
New aircraft, not yet painted.

Is vinyl an alternative to paint? If so, would it be more durable?
 
Probably not more durable. The vinyl trim on my RV-6 (there's not much of it) is in much worse shape than the 18 year old paint.

I am also of the opinion that you still need to prime under vinyl to avoid the corrosion like we sometimes see when moisture gets under the blue film over new parts from Van's. By the time you do the prep work and prime, you're at least half way into a good paint job.
 
Corrosion would be one of my concern as well as how to check for possible cracks in the skin. Would that show if wrapped?
 
Vinyl

As for durability the vinyl on my aircraft is starting to show some wear after three years. But I wrapped my aircraft with an expectation of replacing it every four years or so. It cost me $3,000 in time and materials to have mine wrapped, $1,000 of that was materials. After watching the installers I am confident I can do the next wrap job. Assuming the material cost go up overtime I figured an average of $1,200 every three to four years. That is a lot less money than paint and after ten or so years a paint job will be showing its age as well.

The material is 3mils thick, it really doesn't hide anything, you can easily see rivets and imperfect fiberglass work. As I polish a portion of my airplane I get up close once a year, really close. I do not believe corrosion will be an issue. As I pull off the old vinyl if I find any I will definitely report it here.

http://www.mykitlog.com/users/display_log.php?user=sdahrens&project=248&category=0&log=264730&row=3

Scroll to the bottom of the page for an image of the aircraft. There is no paint, just vinyl and polish
 
I would vote paint the plane white (or any color) and use vinyl to make it look good.

I painted my entire airplane, but couldn't figure out a good way to checker the tail. My wife has a cricket vinyl cutter and we just cut out a bunch of white squares with "permanent" outdoor vinyl. Tail looks fantastic.

If you are concerned about paint being toxic, consider Stewart Systems. While its not non-toxic, its pretty close. Much better than most paints. If you follow the directions EXACTLY, it turns out nice. You still need a respirator to spray it.
 
I would vote paint the plane white (or any color) and use vinyl to make it look good.

I painted my entire airplane, but couldn't figure out a good way to checker the tail. My wife has a cricket vinyl cutter and we just cut out a bunch of white squares with "permanent" outdoor vinyl. Tail looks fantastic.

If you are concerned about paint being toxic, consider Stewart Systems. While its not non-toxic, its pretty close. Much better than most paints. If you follow the directions EXACTLY, it turns out nice. You still need a respirator to spray it.

I checkered my tail also. I went to a sign shop and told the guy what I wanted to do, he made me a sheet of vinyl with I think 3 inch squares big enough to cover the entire rudder.. I applied the entire sheet to my tail and removed every other square.
 
3M 2080

I plan to wrap and already Alodined the entire exterior.
You may be interested in the new 3M film. They are eliminating 1080 and rolling out 2080 in 2020. It carries a longer warranty plus comes with a clear film to aid install. The clear is removed after install
 
thanks everyone.

I want something that is effort-free. so I think I am going to go for paint...unless the new 3M film is more durable and cheaper than paint. I want a pretty simple scheme anyway, red at the bottom, white at the top, so the flexibility advantage of vinyl is not important to me.

PS: there were other posts in VAF forum about "wraps" and "wrapping," but not in this paint subforum, worth reading.
 
Not an RV story but does relate to the vinyl discussion. I just finished wrapping my new aircraft, a SPA Panther, with the new 3M 2080 film. For size comparison, the Panther is a single seater, maybe similar to an RV-3.

It was my first experience with vinyl so I can't comment on how it compares to the 1080 product. I wrapped the entire aircraft including the cowling, canopy skirt and tail fairing. I don't have wheel fairings but I would have tried them if I had.

The color scheme is pretty simple, red over white with an accent stripe below the red.

There's not a lot online info for wrapping aircraft but there's a ton of videos about wrapping cars and I watched a lot of those. My thought was that wrapping a car was a whole lot harder than wrapping an airplane. I was mostly right but there were some areas on my plane that were difficult where there were some pretty aggressive compound curves.

The clear outer film on the 2080 product worked well to protect the colored film from being marred during installation on the flat and most curved surfaces but got in the way when stretching over compound curves.

As to cost, I spent $1300 for all the vinyl and ended up overbuying. If I were to do it again my guess is the vinyl cost would be about $1000 or so. I did a rough estimate of what the paint alone would cost and I think it would be about double that.

I spent maybe as much as $100 for tools (heat gun, squeegees, etc) and about another $200 for the Prostripe accent stripe and knifeless tape. I used the knifeless tape make ALL the cuts on the aircraft where pieces of vinyl came together. I overlapped all vinyl joints by slightly less than 1/16". Ther knifeless tape makes that easy. I used almost 165 meters of knifeless tape.

I'm sure the total cost of materials and tools was under $1500.

My rivets were mostly flush pulled rivets with some universal head pulled rivets and flush driven tossed in. They were easy but somewhat time consuming. After post-heating the vinyl and doing the final squeege I used my thumb to push down on every rivet. That seals around the rivet and makes a nice finish. Sometimes I needed to put a pinprick hole in the center of the rivet to let out trapped air.

I can't paint so I don't know how long painting an aircraft like this would take but wrapping is time consuming, at least it was for a novive like me - it took me 110 hours to wrap the Panther. I did the whole job myself - a helper would have made it very much faster.

It was an interesting experiment and I'm pleased with the result. It's not perfect but looks pretty nice if you don't know where the flaws are :). It'll be interesting to see what the durability of the vinyl is and the whole issue of corrosion is still pretty much of an unknown. I applied the vinyl directly on the aluminum with no primer. The Panther's skin is 6061-T6, somewhat less suseptible to corrosion than 2024. The vinyl's adhesive sticks VERY tightly and I think there's a good chance that it might actually peel off some primer if the vinyl is lifted to reposition it after laying it down. Not sure about that tho.

If interested, here's a link to my photo log. The vinyl photos are way down at the bottom.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/HvV8XnPvk7fcZD778
 
I recently read an article somewhere that Boeing is experimenting with vinyl wrap on the fuselage.
 
Not an RV story but does relate to the vinyl discussion. I just finished wrapping my new aircraft, a SPA Panther, with the new 3M 2080 film. For size comparison, the Panther is a single seater, maybe similar to an RV-3.

It was my first experience with vinyl so I can't comment on how it compares to the 1080 product. I wrapped the entire aircraft including the cowling, canopy skirt and tail fairing. I don't have wheel fairings but I would have tried them if I had.

The color scheme is pretty simple, red over white with an accent stripe below the red.

There's not a lot online info for wrapping aircraft but there's a ton of videos about wrapping cars and I watched a lot of those. My thought was that wrapping a car was a whole lot harder than wrapping an airplane. I was mostly right but there were some areas on my plane that were difficult where there were some pretty aggressive compound curves.

The clear outer film on the 2080 product worked well to protect the colored film from being marred during installation on the flat and most curved surfaces but got in the way when stretching over compound curves.

As to cost, I spent $1300 for all the vinyl and ended up overbuying. If I were to do it again my guess is the vinyl cost would be about $1000 or so. I did a rough estimate of what the paint alone would cost and I think it would be about double that.

I spent maybe as much as $100 for tools (heat gun, squeegees, etc) and about another $200 for the Prostripe accent stripe and knifeless tape. I used the knifeless tape make ALL the cuts on the aircraft where pieces of vinyl came together. I overlapped all vinyl joints by slightly less than 1/16". Ther knifeless tape makes that easy. I used almost 165 meters of knifeless tape.

I'm sure the total cost of materials and tools was under $1500.

My rivets were mostly flush pulled rivets with some universal head pulled rivets and flush driven tossed in. They were easy but somewhat time consuming. After post-heating the vinyl and doing the final squeege I used my thumb to push down on every rivet. That seals around the rivet and makes a nice finish. Sometimes I needed to put a pinprick hole in the center of the rivet to let out trapped air.

I can't paint so I don't know how long painting an aircraft like this would take but wrapping is time consuming, at least it was for a novive like me - it took me 110 hours to wrap the Panther. I did the whole job myself - a helper would have made it very much faster.

It was an interesting experiment and I'm pleased with the result. It's not perfect but looks pretty nice if you don't know where the flaws are :). It'll be interesting to see what the durability of the vinyl is and the whole issue of corrosion is still pretty much of an unknown. I applied the vinyl directly on the aluminum with no primer. The Panther's skin is 6061-T6, somewhat less suseptible to corrosion than 2024. The vinyl's adhesive sticks VERY tightly and I think there's a good chance that it might actually peel off some primer if the vinyl is lifted to reposition it after laying it down. Not sure about that tho.

If interested, here's a link to my photo log. The vinyl photos are way down at the bottom.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/HvV8XnPvk7fcZD778

Great Job on the Panther, she's a beauty! vinyl looks great too!
 
Thanks. It was something I wanted to experiment with and it was fun project. I've heard talk about a "Show" paint job and a "10 foot" paint job. These pictures show it at about 20 feet. I'm sure not an expert at this but to my eye the bulk this looks real good to very close. There are some areas however, notably around the lower cowling opening where there are some pretty aggressive compound curves, that were more challenging.

It'll be interesting to see what the longer term durability turns out to be.
 
Transparent Wrap Over Polish

crazy idea here---I like the polished look, but I don't like the idea of high upkeep maintenance. is there transparent vinyl that one can lay over the bare shiny aluminum and thereby get the best of both worlds??
 
As for durability the vinyl on my aircraft is starting to show some wear after three years. But I wrapped my aircraft with an expectation of replacing it every four years or so. It cost me $3,000 in time and materials to have mine wrapped, $1,000 of that was materials. After watching the installers I am confident I can do the next wrap job. Assuming the material cost go up overtime I figured an average of $1,200 every three to four years. That is a lot less money than paint and after ten or so years a paint job will be showing its age as well.

My experience from maintaining a fleet of 10+ RV’s is that properly applied paint will outlast vinyl by a very large margin. As far as costs go, I assume $1200 every 3 years is a DIY (based on your original cost of $3000?).
The DIY paint job on my personal airplane cost me $1200 (single stage polyurethane fleet paint system) and at 5 years old it looks the same as the day it came out of the paint booth.

I think vinyl is an alternative for someone that doesn’t know how to paint (and doesn’t want to spend time learning), but in the DIY context, I don’t think it saves any $$$$ andit will not have the same life span.
 
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