Door Handle Practice

When it comes to learning to wrap, it doesn’t matter how many YouTube videos you watch as it is never as easy as it looks once you actually attempt to do it. There is no substitute for experience and the only way to get that is to practice over and over again.

My car sits outside all the time as I do not have a garage so this gives me a limited window of opportunity to practice on it depending on when I have free time and the weather is OK.

I decided to head down to my local car wrecker to pick up a couple of door handles so I could practice on them. Since they are small items, I can practice while sitting in my living room at any time of the day or night when I have free time.

I chose to get 2 different kinds of handles, the pullout and the pullup which are shown below.

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When I was searching for videos on wrapping door handles, pretty much all of them showed how to wrap the pull out version but it was very hard to find one that showed the pull up version.

I eventually found the video below and while it is not exactly the same handle as the one I had at least it was a start. I decided to use Avery Dennison Roaring Thunder ColourFlow series film.

Attempt 1

I started to think of how I would approach this as there were a few options I could try so I decided to try the same technique in the video of just starting from the bottom and laying the vinyl down into the recess. I soon discovered that this was a mistake as the handle I had was slightly different to the one in the video. My handle had the part that you lift sit inside the base meaning that once I got to the hinges, I had to cut the vinyl all the way to the top to get around them. The cuts would then be visible along the top.

Attempt 2

The only way I could think of getting around the hinges was to take the handle apart. This left me with just the base which seemed like it would be a lot easier. I placed the vinyl over the base but this time I did not lay the vinyl into the recess. Instead I placed it flat over the base and then ran my finger around the edge. The plan wasto heat and stretch the vinyl into the recess. This was a big mistake as the recess is very deep and thinking about it later, it required at least 30% stretch and more in some places.

As you can see from the photo below, the vinyl stretched so much in some places that it split and the original colour was showing through.

Attempt 3

For the third attempt I tried laying the vinyl into the recess but as I got towards the end I ended up with too much vinyl bunching up around the edge as seen in the images below. I tried making a relief cut and pull the excess into the area that was cut away but this was not enough.

Attempt 4

For the next attempt I looked back at the previous results to see where I might be going wrong. In the second attempt, stretching into the recess caused too much stretch but no issues on the edges. The third attempt of laying into the recess caused excess vinyl on the edge. I thought maybe the solution was somewhere in between so I decided to lay some of the vinyl in the middle of the recess and then stretch the rest.

As you can see below the vinyl is layed into the recess and the edges are smooth however the stretch in the top left was still too much and the vinyl has ripped.

Summary

With the handle put back together again the problem areas are not visible, however I would think that over time this would cause issues with water and dirt getting under the vinyl and causing it to lift.

I’m thinking that the recess on the left side would probably require an inlay instead for it to work or if a thicker vinyl was used like Hexis, the stretching might work.

This handle is something that I will come back to later on when I have more experience. As for the pull out handle that I also got from the wreckers, I will write about that attempt in another blog.

If you have any tips, suggestions of links to videos please comment below.

Thanks for reading!