When wrapping an old vehicle with vinyl wrap film, you may come across old rubber moldings, which are flaking off and have lots of dirt behind them.
It can take a lot of time and energy to deal with this bad condition during the prepping. If you cannot fix those flakes, achieving a clean wrap finish will be difficult.
Don’t worry if that is what you face now, because there are ways to make things much more manageable. Here are the tips:
Take advantage of edge seal tape
After regular cleaning and prepping, you can leave the flaking rubber. Apply Knifeless on its outside and leave just enough space from the rubber. Thus, you will have a gap when you release the Knifeless tape and remove the excess vinyl film.
From this gap, you will see the original color of the car. But do not worry. This is where you will apply an edge seal tape. There is black edge seal tape in the market, like Mold N’ Hold, which can match the rubber. Run it along the gap, and the original color and peeling from the rubber should get perfectly covered up then.
Paint it black
Alternatively, you can put a bit of black paint underneath the molding to hide the imperfection. Get creative and use tools (for example, a cable) to open up the rubber molding. You can then get some black paint behind smoothly. To avoid affecting the areas you should not paint, you can apply masking tape on the outside of the rubber molding beforehand.
This method is suitable for old vehicles like those which are already rusty. Vinyl wrap films on cars like these might bounce back quickly. And thus, you might not necessarily do this because of lousy rubber at some point. Painting it black, you can feel free to wrap it just to the edge without worrying too much.
These are the two simple ways to handle old rubber molding for a perfect finish. Hopefully, these tips can ease your wrap jobs. Learn more about wrapping at teckwrap.com
