It's A Wrap!

To promote the Convoy in the Park event at Donington Park on 22-23 July, a 64-plate Daf XF has been suitably wrapped. T&D finds out what the process entails

- Dan Parton

It all started with a rough pencil drawing on a sheet of paper sent over by the Convoy in the Park team, hastily sketched out and coloured in. But for the team at RGVA Vehicle Graphics, this is often par for the course for the start of a job – they’ve certainly seen worse!

That initial idea gave a start for RGVA’s graphic designer Arthur Delost to turn the sketch into a design that could be wrapped onto a truck. Given that, and a Convoy in the Park flyer, he was able to progress from initial concept to design in 48 working hours, which is a roughly standard timescale for this sort of job.

Delost was mindful that the design had to be symmetrical and the striking chequered flag motif was worked up in partnership with the Convoy team. “The biggest challenge was setting up the artwork; to make it fit we had to stretch the image quite a lot and add a few Photoshop tweaks to make it look the same on both sides,” he says.

From there, it went to the ‘print and plot’ stage, where the design is broken down into individual panels, and then printed onto the specialist vinyl. Printing out the panels can take up to four or five hours, according to RGVA’s production manager, Darcy Aherne. Following that, the panels are cut, ready to hand to the fitters to place them on the truck. Aherne adds that every stage is quality controlled to ensure everything is correct – this ensures jobs aren’t held up later by finding errors or faults that would require panels to be reprinted.

Enter the truck

Once the design had been agreed, arrangements were made to bring in the truck, a 64-plate Daf XF Euro 6, to RGVA’s workshop in Maid stone, Kent for wrapping.