Vintage Tricycle Resurrection with Modern Technology

Step 6: Vinyl-cut Fender Graphics...

As I stripped away the paint I uncovered the original fender graphics which were in remarkably good shape. They were a cool retro arrow design that I really liked. I knew that I had to replicate them on the restored trike. I imported the hi-res photo of the fender graphics into CorelPaint and cleaned them up as best I could. Reduced colours, erased defects, converted to Black & White etc. This image was then imported into CorelDraw to make a vector. I hand traced the image using the line tool then deleted the original image to be left with only a vector drawing. I then cleaned up the vector to make the curves smooth and the corners sharp. Using guidelines I adjusted for the curve on the original fender photo and resized the image to match the fender. I flipped the image for the reverse side of the fender (and doubled it in case I screwed up the installation), finally I exported the vector to an Adobe Illustrator file suitable for my local sign guy.

I dropped off the file on a usb key at noon and chose a light tan vinyl that perfectly matched the paint color on the rest of the bike. 3 hours & $15 later I had the cut graphic in my hand! Application was easy just peel and stick, it went on perfect and looked amazing! Without a computer and a digital cutter this would have to have been manually cut or even worse manually painted. I cannot see any way that it would have turned out as perfect as it did without today's technology for an amateur restorer like myself.