
Night Raven Instructions:
The white vinyl-backed prints will look immeasurably
better if you protect them with a layer of packing tape.
Before you get started, just pull off enough from the
roll to cover the entire line, and apply over the
stickers. Rub out the air and use your nail to
smooth it out. That is important step number one I
spoke about above. For the circular stickers on
both white and clear vinyl, you should take a circle
stencil and draw perfect circles on the reverse side of
the stickers. I find the easiest way to do this is
against a window, drawing the circles on the BACKING.
This way, you've got a nice guide to follow and cut them
out perfectly. Do this for the Ravens and all the
cobra sigils and then cut out all your circles.
Move slowly and don't hold your breath. For the
white-backed sigils you are going to cut out square or
in straight lines, cut as close to the printed surface
as possible. In the case of the controls and the
"eject" stickers, you want to cut those out ON the
lines.
Now for second important step number two. The
white-backed stickers are printed with a black
background that, once you gloss them with the packing
tape and apply to the black Night Raven, will simply
appear to be glossy clear stickers. The one thing
that you must do to every sticker being applied to the
black areas is take a black sharpie marker and line the
edge of the sticker. Hold the sticker by the front
and back and use the side of the marker tip to quickly
go around the edge. If you hold the sticker so the
tip slips off onto the backing and not the front, if you
do slip, you will only mark the back and not the sticker
front. You MUST do this step because the white
vinyl is white all the way through, and if you do not
black out the sticker edges they will show a super-fine
white line around the edge, the amount they are raised
off the vehicle.
You will note the only real colors change to the Raven is the fact that the three underside stickers are printed with black text instead of white. I feel the underside stickers look best on clear vinyl, and since I do not print white, I made the text black. The white from the original set does not show up too well against the gray anyway, so this also an aesthetically pleasing change for better contrast. The six small red sigils are the ones that go on the missiles and bombs. Oh, and the last thing you should do after the vehicle looks all nice and whiz now is wax it. I did my top (the black) with "Future" floor wax after the stickers were applied and the thing looks like it just rolled off the assembly line.