- What it is
- Printed self-adhesive film applied to the painted body of a van, car, truck or trailer. A full wrap covers every visible panel and is trimmed into the door shuts, so the vehicle appears to have been resprayed. A part wrap covers chosen panels — the doors, the rear, one flank — and uses the vehicle’s own paint as the background. A part wrap is not a lesser version of a full one: on a body with heavy creasing it is frequently the better specification and the more durable one.
- What it is printed on
Cast vinyl with an air-release adhesive, over-laminated against UV and washing. Cast film is the only sensible face for a wrap: it is made without the built-in tension a calendered film carries, so it settles into a recess and stays there instead of slowly crawling back out of it. Windows take a perforated one-way film so the driver’s view is not obstructed. None of it is a sheet the caliper table holds.
- How it feels
- Once it has been post-heated and the seams are down, a good wrap feels like paint with a slightly softer edge — warm rather than cold under a palm, with only the door shuts and the recesses giving it away. A matt or satin laminate is dry and chalky to touch and shows a fingerprint far more readily than a gloss one.
- What it suits
- Fleet livery, event and roadshow vehicles, product launches, and any business whose vehicle is parked where its customers already are. It does not suit a vehicle with failing or resprayed paint — film takes poor paint off with it when it is removed — and it does not suit a leased vehicle until somebody has read the return conditions.
- Lead time
- Standard turnaround is 7–14 working days. Installation, where it applies, is scheduled on top of that.
- The common mistake
- Designing to a flat side elevation. A van flank is not a rectangle: it has a swage line, a fuel flap, a rubbing strip, door handles and a wheel arch cut out of the bottom of it, and a logo centred on the drawing regularly lands across a recess where it distorts and collects dirt. Work from photographs of the actual vehicle or a template for that exact model, and keep type off the creases.
Print idea
Vehicle wraps and part wraps
Cast film conformed over a vehicle’s panels, curves and recesses. A full wrap changes the colour of the vehicle; a part wrap puts the message where the panels are flat and leaves the difficult geometry alone.
Standard turnaround is 7–14 working days.
What vehicle wraps and part wraps is
Printed self-adhesive film applied to the painted body of a van, car, truck or trailer. A full wrap covers every visible panel and is trimmed into the door shuts, so the vehicle appears to have been resprayed. A part wrap covers chosen panels — the doors, the rear, one flank — and uses the vehicle’s own paint as the background. A part wrap is not a lesser version of a full one: on a body with heavy creasing it is frequently the better specification and the more durable one.
Cast vinyl with an air-release adhesive, over-laminated against UV and washing. Cast film is the only sensible face for a wrap: it is made without the built-in tension a calendered film carries, so it settles into a recess and stays there instead of slowly crawling back out of it. Windows take a perforated one-way film so the driver’s view is not obstructed. None of it is a sheet the caliper table holds.
- The laminate. It takes the wear, not the print.
- The ink.
- The face film.
- The adhesive.
- The release liner, peeled away at the moment of application.
- The a painted vehicle panel. The film is on the near face, so nothing protects the print but the laminate over it.
- The swage line. Cast film settles into it; a calendered film crawls back out of it.
The specification
Six fields, and the last one is the useful one.
The same six questions are answered for every entry in this section, in the same order, so two objects can be compared without reading two pages of prose. The mistake is stated last and stated plainly, because it is the one that costs a reprint and it is the reason this page is worth sending to a colleague.
Where this sits.
Every entry is indexed three ways, because a buyer arrives knowing the occasion, the object or the material and almost never all three.
- Format
- Material and effect
Also worth looking at
- One-way vision window filmStandard turnaround is 7–14 working days.
- Cut and contour-cut vinyl graphicsStandard turnaround is 7–14 working days.
- Wall muralsStandard turnaround is 7–14 working days.
- Large formatThe specification, and how it is quoted
- Every print idea, indexed three waysThe section index
- The materials libraryCaliper, weight and what each finish costs
Send the specification for this, and it comes back quoted.
Every job is quoted from its specification — stock, quantity, sides, finish, size and deadline.
- Quantity
- Stock — or the feel you want, if you do not know the stock
- Sides printed
- Finish
- Flat and finished size
- The deadline
Artwork is welcome but not required to start. Email sales@ezprint.com.sg if you would rather attach files.