Vinyl wrap leading edge - and problems with bug or other damage?

I'm doing a partial vinyl wrap including part of the wing leading edge.

I'm wondering whether I need to add leading edge tape to protect the vinyl?

Tia
Gary

Gary
FWIW, I have vinyl stripes on the wings that come forward wrapping around and slightly underneath the leading edge. Bugs wipe right off. The ones on the fuselage come almost to a point at the cowl and neither have shown any signs of damage or any tendency to come loose. They've been on for 15 years and still look good. Hope that helps.

Don

3 years and 165+ hrs so far and no problem. Everything you see is vinyl wrap except for the cowl, wheel pants and Wing tips. I wipe down after each day of flying so the bugs don’t accumulate and dry too much. I think the bugs come off a little easier on the vinyled parts (wing leading edges) than the painted cowl, and wing tips. If you’d like hi-res pictures, I can email. Bevan

Thanks

Bevan said:

3 years and 165+ hrs so far and no problem. Everything you see is vinyl wrap except for the cowl, wheel pants and Wing tips. I wipe down after each day of flying so the bugs don?t accumulate and dry too much. If you?d like hi-res pictures, I can email. Bevan

Click to expand...

your bird it's beautiful. I love the design. nice job!

Ive found mine to be pretty durable. Couple areas like the vinyl around the landing lights has lifted a touch where it sits over the top of the Lexan and also where the blue on the vertical stabilizer comes to a very sharp point (very little surface area at the point) so I used edge tape (clear) and it’s been fine since bugs come off easy and I polish the whole airplane with plexus.
Www.vansrv6.com to see it.

Caution, the website and write up sucks, I put the whole web site together in about 30 min in including securing domain names, and the Weebly site kept freezing with uploading so many pics so quickly, I’ll fix it soon and add more info just haven’t had time. Lots of typos and misspellings but it was a rushed thing just to get pics up and some info. I had a lot of people asking about it.

Turbo69,
Did you do the upper cowl with one piece of vinyl? I?m going to try it and wondered if it would be possible to do one piece or do the air intakes in front of no. 1 and 2 seperatly. How do you get the wrap to lay down without wrinkles there? In another post, you mentioned smoothing the edge of vinyl that was under another layer of vinyl so it wouldn?t show through, could you elaborate?
Bill

So I did wrap the entire uppper cowl in one piece however the inlets did get extensions inside that were separate pieces. Probably about 2 inches in. It was a pretty difficult job and you have to be careful to think through any stretch ahead of the next set of curves. You can’t over stretch it or it’ll pull back no matter how much heat ( 90 degrees celcius is recommended) you use to remove its memory on my lower cowl where the air inlets are I had to put two patch pieces on the inner tight turns because they kept lifting, part of this may have been that I had some cracking their that I filled with marine 5200 and the vinyl doesn’t like to stick to the marine 5200 very well. I’d suggest using icing, and prime for crack fill in the future. That’s what I used up on the top of the cowl for heat cracks and it worked very well. I had just missed those little cracks in the tight radius and figured the marine 5200 was quick and easy for a filler. It may have popped either way it’s a pretty tight radius.

As for blending a seam you could use a filler like icing to bridge one piece of vinyl to another or just abraid the edge with something. I did a small area that had tight tolerance with a file and went over it and it made that ( under )seam non exaistent. ( You’ll always see the top one) It really wasn’t a cosmetic area though it was mainly for a clearance issue.

If you place seems where your eye thinks there should be a seem in a panel you really don’t notice it very much. It’s not paint and it’ll have its differences but the trade offs are worth it, IMO