Dear USCutter forums,
Way too recently, I heard about vinyl car wraps for the first time. I'm not sure how I missed out for such a long time; but better late than never I guess. Anyhow, when I first found out about the idea of wrapping a car (or parts of a car) I was obsessed with the idea and knew that I had to try it myself. Being the cheap person that I am, I went and found the cheapest carbon fiber wrap material on eBay that I could. I knew that this was probably a foolish decision, but I decided to try it anyway. I also decided to wrap the side-view mirrors of my car before anything else. I knew this was also probably a foolish decision; but my logic was that if I could figure out how to wrap the mirrors, I should be able to wrap basically any other piece of the car.
So here I am, a few weeks later. I've wrapped each mirror a few times and don't quite have the hang of it yet. I'm convinced it's not a material issue, but rather user error. I'll explain why in a second; but let be first show you what I'm trying to wrap. This is a side view mirror on a '97 Taurus, and it's turned out to be even harder than I though it was going to be. Below are a couple pictures of the mirror itself:
I know the mirror is already (partially) wrapped in those photos; but now you know what I'm dealing with. A borderline nightmarish amount of curves. Here's the problem though:
I know what you're supposed to do is pre-stretch the material, then shrink it back down to fit the mirror. I'm running into some issues with this. First, it doesn't shrink back enough, even if I stretch it lots initially (like 2x the original size, which would be considered "overstretching.") Also, as I try to shrink it; the vinyl start to crease in multiple places and starts to look like this:
Although it can crease far worse than what is pictured above. Also, the reason I know that it's not a material issue, is because I recently ordered some 3M stuff thinking that it would solve all the world's problems. It didn't. It certainly did work slightly better than the eBay stuff, but I still ended up running into the same issues. If I try to stretch the vinyl around the curves while it's on the mirror, I just end up overstretching it. I've even stretched it so far sometimes that it's even ripped, but it still wasn't enough to get it around the curves.
So basically, I'm having trouble getting the vinyl around the curves of the mirror. Pre-stretching isn't working, and stretching it around the curves isn't working either. What should I try? I feel like I'm missing something. If you guys have any ideas on how to wrap this particular mirror, they would be greatly appreciated. Maybe I just need to wrap it in multiple parts, but I'm not a huge fan of doing that if I can avoid it. Thanks again!
