Starting on Truck Doors
Have you ever seen words on the door of a truck?
You know, the words that say it’s from ABC Plumbing, located at XYZ boulevard, and having some phone number?
These words are often made out of vinyl and are stuck directly on the side of the door a few letters at a time. Unsurprisingly this technique is called vinyl lettering. It’s used for lots of small to medium sized business trucks because its easy to apply, relatively cheap, and if they want to sell the truck, also easy to remove. They can either be placed on or taken off in under an hour as long as you have reasonable weather outside and a handful of tools, none exotic. I know this because when I was younger I watched as my parents put this type of lettering on trucks. It’s weather resistant so it can be left in the sun or rain once applied. As long as you don’t get in an accident it’s rather durable. It’s one of the many small things that make the modern world look the way it does. This series is about small stuff that can often be overlooked but you don’t come to this blog for a story about trucks and vinyl lettering, so lets talk about vinyl lettering on rockets and why it doesn’t work as well as on trucks.
Note: The first post in this series is about non flush screws on rockets and you can find it here.
Vinyl lettering on IREC 2017
In order to put the names of sponsors, the school, and identification for the rocket, we turned to vinyl lettering. The same type described in the opening of this post. The difference is that we do not have a vinyl cutting machine, which means that we had to cut out all our shaped by hand. Curves were hard but from a normal distance away it looks presentable.
Why its not Ideal
Now if everything was perfect with the vinyl, this would make a very boring post. There were two main problems with the vinyl , aerodynamics and wear. Because the vinyl does not lay flat on the body, but instead is a slight protrusion we again run into the fact that it could possibly trip the flow over the rocket causing more drag. This is similar to what was gone over in the first post here, but at a much smaller scale. This isn’t a big concern but being in the mindset of “Everything causes drag, how can we minimize it” is a good place to be when you’re designing a rocket.
The more salient lacking of vinyl for use on rockets, is it’s durability. While it can survive for years on a car door, a rocket landing is a different scenario. When a rocket lands using a parachute, if there is wind, it can be dragged for a few feet. This dragging along with the sand of the New Mexico dessert began to tear at our vinyl. Below is an image showing parts of the vinyl having tears and starting to come unglued from the rocket after only a single launch.
We were lucky because we didn’t have too much wind that day. If there was more wind, or we tried to launch it again we would probably have our logos pealing off.
How to fix it
Because we don’t need to remove the logos on the rocket, we can think of a more permanent solution. All the logos are a single color so I suggest we just paint them on. Instead of using vinyl lettering we would simply cut out a paper stencil and then spray paint the logos directly onto the rocket body. Afterwords we could then applying a clear coat on top of that. Because it’s a layer of paint, it wont be as bad aerodynamically and the clear coat should help protect the logos from peeling off or chipping durring landing. This will help keep the rocket looking sharp for multiple launches.
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