Badge Overlays

June 16, 2019 Off By Wrap Student

There are so many aspects to the vinyl wrapping industry apart from wrapping cars. So many people are out there doing so many cool things with vinyl and one of them is using decals to customise car emblems and badges.

It’s something that is relatively simple yet looks so cool and does not require much effort. All you really need apart from the vinyl and basic wrapping tools is a plotter to cut out shapes and designs.

I had been looking at purchasing a plotter for a while but they were a bit out of my price range. I looked at some cheaper models on eBay but was hesitant on the quality. I came across a used Silhouette Portrait plotter for $100 which is less than half the price of a new one so I jumped at the chance of buying it.

The Silhouette Portrait is not very big and is designed for small designs as it has a maximum cutting width of 8 inches, however this is more than enough to make some pretty good sized decals.

The Silhouette Portrait is only 40 cm long (16 inches)

Once I got the plotter home I installed the software onto my computer and for someone who has never used a plotter before I had a design cut out within 15 minutes due to how simple it was to use.

Right! Time to customise the badge on my Subaru!

I have seen this done a few times on Instagram and thought that it looked pretty cool. The colour combinations and design possibilities are endless.

I decided to start off simple with a navy blue background and gold design. The badge is an oval shape and I had 2 options here. The first was to cut out an overlay on the plotter for the background and then cut out the design that will go on top separately and then put them together. The second option was to just cut a piece of vinyl and lay it over the badge and cut around the edge. Then the design can be laid over the top.

I decided to go with option 2 as I only had a limited amount of vinyl available and couldn’t afford multiple attempts to get the background shape cut out to the exact size.

I searched Google for a design of the Subaru logo and then pasted it into the Silhouette Studio plotter software. After taking a measurement of the width of the badge on the car, I adjusted the size of the picture in the software which was pretty easy as the length and width appear as you are making the adjustment.

You can simply drag and image into the software and start editing

To cut the vinyl on the Silhouette Portrait you need to place the vinyl on a cutting matt which has a sticky surface and holds the material in place. Since the plotter was second-hand it did not come with one so I used a thick piece of paper as the matt and held the vinyl in place with some masking tape.

To cut the design out you just feed in the vinyl to the plotter, trace the image in the software and then click the Send button.
It only took about 45 seconds to cut out the design and then you have to remove the excess vinyl to reveal the design which is called weeding. Once you are done you are left with the design on the backing paper. Normally from here you would use some application tape over the top but since I did not have any I just used strips of masking tape and overlapped them. This is not ideal but is OK if you are not going to leave it on there for a long period of time.

Now all that was left was to install it so I laid down the piece of navy vinyl
and used an Avery FleXtreme squeegee to make sure the vinyl was all the way to the edge of the badge. I then cut away the excess and went over the edges again with the FleXtreme.