Well...for the non-intellectual here, the "Plays with Matches" theme is more a reflection of the attitude and reputation of those on board than anything having to do with fire and water ...but I suppose if you look at it that way, it's all the more reason to keep a hull lit high and dry!

...a mile behind..ouch...eat my smoke (upwind) . I may have to put that on the trailer...."eat my smoke"

Is that a sticker your putting on? How does that work, I've been tryign to talk my fiance into painting something, but her motivation level is fairly low for that, something about planning a wedding, I'm not really sure , anyhow, What does it cost to have big stickers like that made?

It is so much easier, and less PERMANENT! I payed $110.00 for both sides, including the lil face you see at the end of the name. The name is Crazy Taino, and the face forms the "O" Click on the thumbnail to see her.

Yeah its much more feasible to do a vinyl than paint.

I like the way mine turned out.

Yeah - this is a decal...but I can only guess at the cost as it's not WHAT you know....Seriously though, I own a graphics business but I can't quite make printed graphics as large as this one is going to be. Fortunately for me my sailing compadre is also in the graphics business and works at a place with considerably larger equipment!

It's a solvent ink that is printed by a large format printer (48" wide so these will be printed side by side) to a vinyl substrate. The graphic is removed from the machine, manually laminated, fed back into the machine, re-aligned, and contour cut. It's not easy or inexpensive. The printer/cutter alone is over $18k!

Full color print substantially adds to the cost of the graphic. If you can use solid contour cut vinyl (no printing - as in the above examples) the price becomes a good bit more reasonable.

Jake,
There is a fairly large sign shop here in our town that now does printed vinyl graphics. Very cool stuff compared to the solid vinyl, but he said the tradeoff of printed vinyl is that it only has a two year lifespan if it sees much sunlight. Maybe your printer is using different inks and it'll last longer?

Jack Hoying
Fort Loramie, Ohio

Or, you could just cover the boat when not in use to save the graphics. I left the 2000 W1000 stickers on my hulls (uncovered) for about 6 months, and it left little "shadows" when I peeled them off. Had to polish the hulls so the reverse image wasn't so obvious.

(sorry for hijacking the thread)

Jack,

Yeah - two years is about it on the ink printed stuff if it's exposed constantly and we do have some concerns about the durability of the vinyl and print in a submerged environment. I have equipment with a thermal epoxy process that lends 5 year outdoor durability but the widest one piece printing I can do is 12" X 48" at 300 dpi or 11" x 36" at 600dpi.