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We apply vinyl decals to shipping containers all of the time at The Container Guy, and we want to share with you all we have learned to make the application as easy as possible, even in the cold!VIDEO Purchase Container Modification World Products Featured in The Video YouTube Video Transcript
In this video, I am going to quickly show you how to install a vinyl die cut decal on a shipping container.
I'm Channing McCorriston, The Container Guy.
It's zero degrees out right now, so we're going to use our Tiger Torch and just heat up the steel,
make sure that it's nice and warm for the vinyl decal's glue to adhere properly.
You'll notice on frosty, frigid mornings that the steel, as you're heating it up, it will almost get wet,
and then, as it gets to the right temperature, it'll dry off again. And now this steel is just nice and warm to touch.
Uh, don't go too hot, especially 'cause this is painted, you could shrivel up the paint, so uh.
Get a nice -- nice and uh, just room temp, I guess, and then ready for your vinyl decal.
The most important part of installing these decals is making sure that you start off nice and straight.
I like to start at the left end and work my way over, and what I do is I take some uh painter's tape.
And you install it on the edge of the decal,
and you make sure that there is no creases or winkles in there because
if there is anything that is screwed up here when you start, it's just going to transfer all the way across
and you're just be running into problems the entire time.
So usually we have larger decals where -- I like to top left align all of our stickers.
I would usually start with this weld over here, and if you hold it up against that weld,
you know that you're uh -- you're nice and plumb, so then you're also gonna be level across.
But here, I want to get it over a bit more,
so might have to just kind of eyeball it, or you can measure down in a couple places from the top tubing
and then you know your sticker's nice a level, but
truck driver's waiting on the other side of this can ready to go, so I gotta go quickly.
Just gonna measure it here.
And then included with your stickers a lot of times, your vinyl decal contractor will provide you a squeegee.
And then so, to get these started, you just go to the back edge and start peeling
and then flip that back over.
And then once you got a good start, you just start squeegeeing all the air out from behind the decal
One thing to note with these decals is, because the container's are corrugated
your graphics guy to add 7% width to the sticker
that, as it appears once you stand back and look at the container, it'll appear the same proportion of your logo, so.
Interesting thing to note, 7% width is the right number.
And then so, once you got it all on, you can kind of go back over it again.
Make sure you squeeze all the air out, especially important in the inside corners. Water can get in behind the vinyl
on these inside corners. It seems that's uh the vinyl expands and contracts.
So once you have everything all squeegeed out, and you feel like the decal behind is all adhered,
you can start peeling away the pre-masking tape.
We like to go from this side back because then it doesn't grab these little uh swooshes on our logo.
So, hopefully everything sticks. It's kind of a cold day here, but
yeah, looks like it's working very well, so.
If I wouldn't have pre-heated this decal
it definitely wouldn't have been that easy so, Tiger Torch is nice if you have that luxury, but.
We also went with black because we painted this can nice and beautiful for the customer, so we wanted to make sure
that we're not sticking out too much and stealing all their fame.
Definitely people walking by, we want them to know who did this job, so.
That right there is how you install a vinyl decal on a shipping container.
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And as always, check us out at tcg.ca.
Hope you learned something!
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