July 16, 2020

Wrapping is sometimes referred to as ‘a signmakers’ Everest.’ Quite a few have managed to climb the steep learning curve, and occasionally someone with experience takes the hard route up…

Jon Rockall is the MD of Rocktek Signs and Custom Wrapping. You’ll find it in High Wycombe. The company has been around a while, long enough to have gained itself a really solid reputation and long enough to have perfected its art too. On that basis, lots of small businesses with big ideas seek its help, and large businesses with big brands to promote use it as well. Good word travels and so lots of interesting jobs come to Jon’s door - some are what you might call more ‘interesting’ than other.

Make no mistake, Jon and the team at Rocktek know how to wrap. Jon’s aptitude for the art saw him powering his way through a Metamark sponsored course at the Roland Academy, itself a fertile environment for the transfer of very involving hands-on skills and for the development of new thinking and ideas. Jon and the company he keeps has applied the learning brilliantly. Wraps and Rocktek are synonymous.

The very proud owner and operator of a rather special car found his way to Rocktek with a job for Jon and the team. He wanted the car wrapping. The vehicle in question answered to the name Radical. It’s a racing car of notable breeding that really sorts the men from those aspiring to be, and it looks like it’s breaking three-figure speeds while it’s just sat on the garage floor doing nothing.

Radical by name. Radical by nature.

The Radical is something of a caricature of itself. Everything that defines its form is determined by the need to move tens of thousands of litres of dense air out of its way at high speed. Its wheel arches aren’t just ‘muscular,’ they’re exaggerated and singular in purpose. The whole car is a moving feast of very complex and grossly proportioned surfaces that just penetrate the air around them in pursuit of speed. In fewer words, it’s far, far from flat. Wrapping it - that’s a challenge.

The design for the wrap was an affair centred around big blocks of solid colour with a bit of detailing to accentuate some of the car’s form. Sorted. Getting the material draped, aligned and elongated to the extent needed, would be an exercise in wrapping technique and skills worthy of an exemplar of its type. Having surveyed the car, Jon approached the job with confidence, and with a few rolls of Metamark MM-CC Colour Change Wrapping Film.

Preparation was key. The car’s gel-coated glass bodywork was meticulously cleaned - three times, and then treated to an application of a panel-prep with almost forensic attention to detail. The car was then deemed ready to wrap.

What follows is an exercise in the wrapper’s art. Pre and post-heated panels, single pieces of MM-CC, were draped and elongated around even the most exaggerated of the Radical’s punishing surfaces. The Metamark MM-CC tolerated the extremes of elongation without losing its colour depth thanks to the skilled application. The applied material was again heat-set with meticulous attention to detail. The panels of secondary colour were cut ‘on-the-vehicle’ using Knifeless tape. The edges’ flow over the vehicle much like air at speed and really flatter an already brutally handsome vehicle. Every detail was wrapped. Under that expertly applied MM-CC colour change material is a white gel-coated glass car - and not a scrap of paint.

Jon Rockall later said of the wrap, “We’re no strangers at Rocktek Signs and Custom Wrapping to challenging wrap jobs but this one took every technical element in the books to extremes. The Metamark MM-CC worked with us every inch of the way and together we’ve produced what I feel is an exception result. My customer agrees. Wrapping is a hands-on skill that requires an aptitude and understanding. The Radical is a living textbook example of where the skills and the right material can take wrapping and design.”

MM-CC was introduced by Metamark to serve the needs of those who seek to change the colour of vehicles without resort to printing. Rocktek Signs’ team have delivered an example that does just that. It just happens to have taken a good idea further, and to have put a few more points yet in Jon’s reputation bank on the way to his summit.