Vinyl wraps. Wrap door handle cup with double thumbs

Many installers have come across a time when they wrap a door handle cup, tons of adhesive lines appear even though they have done every step right. There is a technique which will help eliminate those adhesive lines in handle cups and improve your job quality. Even more, it saves your install times, especially for color change.

Let's take a look at what would happen precisely without this technique and then show you how to use this technique to keep you from those troubles.

In a very standard way to install a door handle cup, we will take the material and bridge it around the area. Then we have our application glove prepared and work around the panel like normal.

There is a fact where the adhesive of materials has been changed in the last couple of years. So with this standard technique that has been applied for ages, where we are working with overlapping finger stroke, working up to the top, forcing the material and air out evenly, and there are no bubbles, every time when we squeegee the material, the film sets up on the edge because of the change of adhesive though. In other words, it is not so much adaptable anymore.

When we are wrapping a van, where the cup handle is particularly steep on the side, what we usually do is to cut the side (where the groove for the door handle is), then hold the material up and work it out. But if we do it this way, you will notice that whenever we pause, there is an adhesive line.

Even though this area is behind the door handle, some clients do care about it, especially when it is for color change. If we get a close-up, we will see tons of lines here, looking like a bad paint job when it is a bad warp job.

It is not necessarily because we did anything wrong, but because of the adhesive is changing the setup. So whenever the adhesive gets to a tension point, it gets set there. And we will be able to see the trace of stroke. This will lower down your wrap quality. If the client is picky enough, sometimes you would even have to re-do it because of those lines, which is frustrating.

We will implement a new technique, where we will use our two thumbs to get everything done. It is based on the palm technique that was developed by professional wrappers, where we work the material to the recessed area first before getting to the flat area to avoid adhesive lines. And this is especially helpful for color change.

Before applying this double thumb technique, we will have to risk prep the material as usual – so clean it thoroughly. Then we take a bit of masking tape and bridge it over the groove of the handle – use just enough to hold it and make sure the air can escape through it.

As soon as we prep it, we put the material on as normal – put it on and bridge it just exactly how we used to do. Next, we come across with the difference: get the heat gun prepared and give the material a bit of heat.

Then, we are not using application glove here. But take both of our thumbs and lick them. In this way, we can easily work the material out of the recessed area is one stroke without getting any bubbles.  

By doing this, it is promising that there will be absolutely no adhesive line at all because we went straight for the recessed area – just like the palm technique: recessed area first and flat area last. But with door handle cup, the flat area is done with this one stroke as well. It is much quicker than doing an overlapping stroke. After everything is set, pick the side up and pull the masking tape out, and the handle cup is well done.

With this technique, there will be no more adhesive lines, and it will raise your wrap quality, particularly for color change job. And the more important thing is that it will keep both you and your client happy.