How to fix cracked & faded RV graphics. Easy DIY job

okay everybody what's going on I read a lot online about I have got cracked and old and faded graphics on my motorhome how do I get how do I fix this problem well I'm going to show you how I fix one of ours using this and this details coming up on RV Street okay let's get right to it there are three ways to deal with faded graphics the first one is just remove it just take it all the way off we had a big maroon graphic here it went from here way down there was about ten feet long it was all cracked it wasn't worth saving so I took a 3m eraser and I got rid of that being compounded polished and waxed you can't even tell that that graphic was even there but I did that four years ago then last year I tried a second way to deal with a bad graphic and that was this long black one again we had a black one that was cracked faded so I went and designed a new graphic in Adobe Illustrator took it too fast signs and they out put that graphic tip for me in their high-end UV resistant vinyl material they laser-cut it in the exact shape that I wanted I brought it back here peeled off the back and put those two spots there but for today we're going to deal with a new way the third way and that is paint over the graphic you're going to need some quarter inch or three sixteenths Auto Detail tape this it comes off in small little strips and it's easy to go around your old graphic and just outline it then you follow up with adding I have three sizes here one inch inch and half and two inch and I continue to outline the border of the graphic with these then I cover the whole motorhome around with paper all these items here by the way we were bought at Home Depot and this paper is to eliminate overspray as you will see shortly then the painting is actually a three-step process one I'm using a gloss white paint and primer all-in-one this I'll use to cover the old red and give me a base blank canvas to work with then I'll follow up with this gloss protective enamel Marilla but Burgundy this color believe it or not was so close to our OEM paint I was like man this is great white off the shelf Maria Burgundy off the shelf and then I followed up with step three of several coats of clear and this is the final result I also did this on the back graphic last week when we were at another park so follow me here I'm going to take you through all the steps of how we did this and then I'll have some finishing comments so as you can see I have finished the back graphic here and so now I'm going to go around here to the driver's side and I am going to do this bottom red one down here up here and this one here which is on our slide okay so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to outline the graphic with the auto detail tape because this tape is very narrow and I can get it right up onto the edge and this is pretty tight so I'm gonna have to do this in several pieces it looks like it's gonna be about four pieces so I'll just tear off another piece and start at a different angle and just keep pushing and very little getting around this little circle right here and so on and so on but once you get off once I got off of that radius there you see it goes pretty quickly so I've got here to the end and I want to make a really sharp cut right there so I take my razor knife I push that in that corner and then I take my razor knife and just cut that so I get a nice clean finish up to this other piece here now another thing to remember is when you're putting on this detail tape after you've done it you want to come all the way around with your finger and really make sure that that's tight that it's fully adhered to the motorhome because if you don't if it's not tight there as I spray some this will become loose and you can get some spray up underneath that tape so you want to make sure that this is good and tight okay so you can see how I've finished all of the quarter-inch detail tape to totally go around the border now I'm applying the blue tape because I want to make sure that I have enough up here to now put paper beyond that and I wanted to show you what I do here is I just start this blue and I just kind of overhang overlap I should say on that green tape and I just keep going like this and this gives me a wider border to to put my paper on and to tape off the motor home from overspray okay so there you go I have it outlined with green tape and then another overlap layer with blue tape and now I'm going to go and start on this one the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna cover the rest of this with paper we're gonna go up all around here and paper off for any overspray and then I also took my wheel cover turned it inside out and put it over the tire to protect the tire in the rim so we're gonna get started tapering off the rest of the motorhome okay so as you can see we have papered off all around the graphic and then came up again here to the window and down to the bottom at this Park I purposely pointed the nose of the coach to the east that puts the passenger side to the south in this side to the north because the wind is broing blowing from east I mean from south to north so I'm doing this side in this part because I'm in the on the north side and there's no wind here when I did the back I did it when the back was to the north also I was parked in a different orientation so I'm accounting for the wind and now the next step is is to sand and rough it up so there's two types of sandpaper I'm using here I'm using a 220 and a 400 so the first thing that I want to do and I'm just going to say this up front I could have compounded and did all kinds of work here to get this as smooth as possible but because of the way that that back one came out I'm not getting this perfect all I'm interested in is getting if I run my nail across this crack I can feel where it drags and hits that just a little bit okay but these aren't nearly as bad as the ones in the back so all I'm going to do is I'm going to take this 300 and I'm just going to come in here and I'm gonna get the main part of these cracks okay I'm gonna go right over these cracks and take out that that where it hits okay because by the time I put several coats of primer and then and then color and then clear these are gonna be about 90% full and when you look at this graphic from about five feet away you're not even gonna be able to tell that anything is under here but if you get really close you probably will see a little remnant of these cracks but again for me I don't care this doesn't need to be perfect when I'm all done with this this thing is gonna look a hundred percent better than what it does now so I'm just gonna continue sanding like this just going over these cracks taking that Ridge out knowing I'm thrilled with that I'm gonna take my four hundred and go a little bit finer so I'm gonna continue doing this and I'll be right back with you okay so I'm continuing to sand here we're only talking about maybe five minutes here okay I'm not I'm not trying to take that all the way down but if you'll notice I'm also going all the way around the outside even where there isn't cracks and I want to rough this up just scuff it some and then that way when I come with my primer another paint I'm giving it a surface that it'll adhere to where right now you see this is not scuffed this is scuffed paint will hear a whole lot better to this and it will this so I'm going over all of this in addition to the cracks and then I'll come back and I will do this one also all painted surfaces will be lightly sand the cracks a little bit more trying to take that little Ridge out of there but I'm scuffing it here to give that new paint a better surface to adhere to okay so that part's sanded let's wipe this off and let's see what it looks like you see how that dust is coming off of there so get all that dust off see hold the rag over I'm using a wet damp cloth here and getting that dust off getting them out of the cracks and now I have a clean surface its sanded and it's ready this sides ready to go one thing I wanted to point out here is that we started this at 10 o'clock this morning it is now 20 to 1 like any paint job the prep work is always the hardest work painting is actually very easy but the prep work is always the hardest it takes the most time so this side here is ready let's move on to the other side ok so the first thing I'm going to do if you remember I showed you in the beginning of the video I'm using three products a paint primer combined okay it's a white gloss paint and primer I'm going to use this for the first couple of coats so I'm going to spray now over all of the red I'm going to let it dry for about an hour and I'm going to sand lightly sand again and then I'm gonna give it a probably a couple more coats and then tomorrow we're going to do the red so if you'll come there are two types of paint cans there's one that has this trigger style and then there's the kind that has the push button on top the trigger style here works the best so I've got the rust-oleum Universal paint and primer all in one and this gives a really nice fan spray of about maybe 810 inches and you just want to make sure that you've shaken it up good and then you do a little test spray okay so you're going to want to be about eight to ten inches away here and you do not want to lay down a lot of paint you want to do it lightly in several layers so it's just very lightly like this if it starts to splatter you can turn the can upside down and clear the spray but don't worry about that because we're going to be sanding any away [Applause] I'm doing this white for two reasons number one I want to block out the existing red the second thing I want to accomplish is I want to fill in the cracks so you can see here this kind of flaked up a little bit but I'm not worried about it because this is all going to be sanded so that's our very first light coat now we're gonna come over here and do the same thing so whenever you buy paint the advice here is if you think well that'll probably take me a can to do that by two because if one starts spitting you're gonna need that other can as a backup now I wanted to make a point here that I bought this at Home Depot because with our coach I was able to find this this primer and paint in one will block and fill perfectly and I was able to find a maroon color paint that was so darn close to our original I thought oh man this is perfect but some of you are going to want to have it exact your something happened to your coach or you have a graphic that you want to do exactly the way it used to be you're gonna have to go get that paint match you're gonna have to take a sample to a paint store and have it match perfectly and put it in cans and then you can do it that way but for me again I'm not looking to recreate factory here I'm looking to get these scratches out of here and the cracking and I just want to bring it back to almost perfect I don't for me I don't need to be perfect alright here we go with a new can you see how smooth that is look at that fans that's a perfect fan let's go back over here and get this again and let's do this one again and one time right here and let's go back over here because in five minutes this is tacky enough where you can come back with a second one and that's it okay well it's day two 9:15 in the morning and you can see this white base coat here really really came out nice and so now I'm going to take this 400 sandpaper very fine and I'm just gonna gently just take off that fresh paint roughness I don't really know how to explain it but you know when you spray a surface after it dries it's just slightly rough so what I'm trying to do now is just take that little roughness off very lightly and look at all those cracks been they all filled in almost a hundred percent I'd say about 90% I'm really happy with that okay so after we sanded with that 400 we take a damp cloth and wipe off all that small amount of dust now if you remember I told you earlier to try to get the paint cans with the trigger on the front but this color which is rust-oleum gloss maroon burgundy it's incredibly how close it matches the factory graphic color but it didn't come with a trigger it came with a button type applicator and I really didn't like that I was like oh man but I had no choice so I went ahead and bought two cans of this in case you know this one starts to spit and spatter too but I was kind of surprised as long as I stayed back you know 10 12 inches it it gave a gave a good fan so you see when you get close you see how narrow it is but if you come back a little bit it spreads it open so that's how you have to use this so let's go ahead and put on our first coat of color very lightly just like we did in the beginning with the with the white we're not trying to get full coverage here we're just trying to get a base coat on here because we don't want to go too heavy and cause runs or anything like that okay we're getting ready for the second coat and we're going to try to be filling in some more of these white areas again staying away and just lightly doing a coat we're still not worried about getting full coverage so because if we do that too early you're gonna get runs then you have to start sanding and it just complicates the whole process it's better to just do several light coats and build it up then one big heavy one okay so we're getting ready to do the last coat I've done about seven coats so far these are the light coats that I showed you in the beginning and just building and building and building and there you have it and now will this wait until tomorrow to put on the clear okay so after all of the burgundy coats that I laid on here somehow I thought we had shot how I put on all the clear and then as I got in to do editing there was no such footage I have no idea what happened but it was the same process okay I did the base coat white several layers I did the Meru the burgundy color several layers and now I came back with a rust-oleum Universal clear same exact process light coats building it up building it up and it was a total of about seven or eight coats of that let it cure overnight and then we went in and started taking off the tape and the paper and to give you guys some context we are in the park here across the street and you can see the coach right there so what we did is we backed up and to our site so that the driver's-side is to the north the wind is coming out of the south so I'm backed up here to the fence the roadway is right there but this side here is all protected from the wind okay well it is Thursday morning this is the fourth day and the final day and as you can see I've taken off all the paper or most of the paper and it's set here all night and has cured and the paint now is nice and dry we're going to go ahead and take off the fine part of the tape that gets really close to the newly painted area and I wanted you to see how I do this because when you pull this tape this blue tape and then I get remember the green the little fine green tape that I used well by painting all those layers of white and red and clear sometimes it'll build a little skin across the paint and that quarter-inch tape so you don't want to just cut in here and just start pulling it off real quick because if that skin is built across there it could tear the paint so at this stage we're going to be careful and I'm going to look and see here where I want to start and I think I'm going to start here and I'm just going to very carefully work my way down to that quarter-inch green tape that detail tape remember that and to go down and get right see there there's the part of that green tape right there and you can see it again here and I'm pulling this blue tape very carefully I don't let it come way out here like this I keep it tight because I don't want that to possibly tear into my paint because if it did tear into the paint I'd have to come back and touch it up with a q-tip so here we go I want you to see right here you see how this is this is where I took on the outside okay you got to be very very careful and sometimes if it starts to tear that paint I'll just take my razor knife and I'll just get it I'll get it just to start so it will not pull see it is pulling right there I'm just gonna hold that and pull that down I'm actually right here this is uh this is an area I know that got really thick so I am just gonna help that cut right there okay okay so you can see we've got all the tape off and you can see that there's some little over spray in here this is where that tape you know it kind of flares up after it's been outside for two or three days sometimes a little pink and get up underneath there and I got a little down here also so once you get all the tape off you can just take a q-tip and put some thinner on it and come on in here and just do some to just do some cleanup and this will eventually get it off you can see this all cleaned up really nice up in there so is this whole painting graphic perfect no but boy it sure is a whole lot better than it was now we're gonna move on on over to here once I've done all of the coach of the clear over the paint and to removed all the paper all the tape and all that I follow up with two coats of rejects I have replaced waxing our coach with this product rejects this product is way better than wax it is easier to put on easier to put off and or to take off I should say but two coats of this blocks 100% of all UV rays protecting these graphics on a Motorhome is really the most important thing that's why these went south in the first place the previous owner that we bought the coach from did not wax this like he should have and those graphics went south in about three years that's not going to happen this time not the way I take care of this coach and using this so that's it guys this was one of my top priorities when we came down to RGV this winter was to knock out this graphic and the one on the back I did this one in one Park where we currently are I did the back graphic and the previous campground that we were in each one took me a total of three and a half to four days to do one day to tape off and prime one day for color one day for the gloss Cove the the gloss finish coat and then a half a day maybe a little more to take all the paper off and do the final cleanup I hope this how-to video on how to fix your faded and crack graphics will help you in the meantime this is our V straight stick around [Music]

Channel: RVstreet

Views: 298,288

Rating: 4.8725605 out of 5

Keywords: fixing RV graphics, protecting your RV, painting RV vinyl graphics, waxing your RV, RV maintenance, RV faded graphics, RV cracked graphics, full time RV living, RV traveling, RV Videos, RV restoration, fix the outside of your RV, RV tips and tricks, cracked RV graphics, Class A graphic restoration, make your RV new again, repair your RV graphics, 5th wheel graphics fix, Gas motorhome maintenance, best DYI RV videos, full time RV Vloggers

Id: PSzhSks0PG4

Length: 28min 3sec (1683 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 20 2020