I am so stoked! Today was the first time this year the temperatures outside hit 60, and the bright sunny day was perfect for going out and working on the boat. I got a LOT done. First I put all the new graphics on. That means I put the Illinois registration numbers on each side of the bow, and the new name on the transom (back wall). Because this boat is new to us, we will have to do an official 'renaming' ceremony when we launch it (or tempt the fates and Neptune, and sail without it... NOT). This was the very first time I ever did anything like this though, first taking off the old vinyl lettering a week ago when the weather was okay (not this warm, but passable) and today applying new vinyl letters and numbers. It was a nervous thing thinking about it all winter. Ended up not being all that hard after all.
I took a few pictures of the process. I couldn't get as many shots of the steps as I would have liked to show you, because I was alone, but here's what I could get. Keep in mind the old letters were taken off a few days ago. I used a heat gun to gently heat the old letters and peel them off. It worked really well. The hard part was getting the old registration stickers off. The previous owner has simply piled layer after layer of registration sticker on top of each other every time they had to re-do them. (It works sort of like an automobile's state license plate sticker). I couldn't follow suit and be lazy putting the new one over the old because this was a different state, and Illinois doesn't have the same size sticker, OR place them in the same place on the bow as Iowa does.
Here in the first picture I have wiped the transom down to clean it of any dust, residual glue or water with rubbing alcohol, and then washed that off with a soapy water spray and dried it well.
Then I taped the two sections of lettering on the back to place it. and lifted one side and peeled off the sticky paper. I used a plastic squeegee to smooth it back down in place and repeated with the other section. Here is the end result.
Then I did the registration letters the same way. Here is a picture of the blank area without any lettering:
And here I got a picture of the placement of the letter strip before I applied them.
In the above picture I already had the state sticker in place. Here is the final picture of each side of the bow with registration set applied.
