Media1 Goes Bombs Away for Extreme Food Truck

Dale Salamacha is co-owner of Media 1 Signs/Wrap This! (Longwood, FL).

This month, we’re going to talk about a really cool project we finished in late July. The food-truck craze has swept our entire nation, and we’ve sunk our teeth into our fair share of this savory business. I’m sure many of you have enjoyed this same opportunity. But, before we get into how we transformed this delivery van with retro-cool style, let’s dissect exactly why food truck owners are ideal clients for a wrap shop.

Roll with opportunities
First, to be in this business, a food-truck owner must wrap his or her vehicle. How else can you tell the public what you offer? Clients who own a bricks-and-mortar business realize the massive importance of having a beautiful, well-designed exterior sign to draw customers into their establishments. But, imagine if you lack a physical address. Food trucks move constantly, and cater different events, sites and crowds. How much more important is it for their bold, in-your-face graphics to lure customers away from competitors parked right beside them? Nobody wants to eat food from a beat-up, dirty food truck! Yuck!
Second, food-truck wraps provide the perfect opportunity for designers to expand their minds! When a food-truck job comes in, it’s open season at Wrap This! Our designers fight for the right to create them. It’s a great situation: clients dying to have your work on their trucks, so they can increase their marketshare, typically give you a blank canvas with which to work. In addition, you’ll gain tons of artistic exposure as the truck constantly moves.
But here’s the real treat. Food trucks are massive, and require an equally massive amount of vinyl to cover them. Five hundred, 600, even 700 sq. ft. of digitally printed graphics is typical for a food truck. And you charge for every one of them. Cha-ching!
Even better, most of them offer a surface of straight, flat panels. You may have to work around some rivets, but that’s much easier than stretching vinyl around a Chevrolet HHR bumper. Does it get any better?

On the fly
Ken Cornell and Denis Neal, owners of the Kenny & Denny’s food truck, are our friends, and their BBQ is among the best in Florida. Even with just a small tent and fold-up table, they’ve gained a huge following at local events. But, last month, they finally bought a truck!
Well, I think it’s a truck. The interior and the cooking gear are in great shape, but the exterior was beat! Rusty propane tanks, flaking paint, a missing front grill, badly needed bodywork – and it was a dirty, faded yellow wherever paint wasn’t peeling off. Nobody would buy food from a truck in this condition. So, they called us.
Enter our designer-extraordinaire, Jason Wissig. Kenny & Denny were completely open to our ideas, and only instructed Jason to “give it an Americana kind of feel” and feature the name, Kenny & Denny’s On the Fly BBQ. The rest was left up to Jason.
The only issue? We had one week to complete it. That’s right – design, print, laminate and install 633 sq. ft. of vinyl in five days. Jason buckled down and knocked it out of the park on his first shot! His aerial-bomber-inspired theme features designs from the Curtiss P40 Warhawk single-engine fighter plane that first flew in 1938. The design features such aircraft elements as large, riveted metal panels; air-intake vents; red striping; and the trademark “tigershark mouth”. This toothy maw was first painted on these planes in 1941, and was made famous by the British Royal Air Force No. 112 Squadron flying out of North Africa.
And, of course, what bomber would be complete without pinup-girl nose art? Especially once Jason situated her sitting atop a freshly made BBQ sandwich! After the art had been approved, we brought the truck in for measurements. When that beast rolled in here, we realized we couldn’t wrap the truck’s four sides without addressing every issue that made it seriously ugly.

Major repairs
Enter Media 1’s fabrication and paint department, which added some character to this design. Spearheaded by our lead fabricator, Steve Pass, we created far more than a cool wrap.
While the wrap crew printed, laminated and installed all the “nose art”, which was printed on 3M™ Controltac™ IJ180-10Cv3 vinyl with an HP 360 latex-ink printer, and protected with a Scotchcal™ 8518 glossy overlaminate applied with a GBC Arctic Titan pressure laminator, the M1 fabrication crew made it really fabulous.
First, the hood bore a massive gash and lacked a front grill. Using fiberglass mat and resin, we repaired the gash. Then, using our MultiCam 3000 5 x 10-ft. CNC router, we transformed a 0.125-in.-thick, aluminum sheet with custom “bomb” cut-outs, which created airflow. We decorated it with matte-finish Matthews acrylic-polyurethane paint, and it was ready for installation.
However, Steve felt it still lacked something. So, using aluminum and drilled-PVC tubing, he fabricated four machine guns and mounted them in the grill. Four small, battery-operated, red LEDs were inserted into the guns to glow red inside. Hell yeah!
That made the front over-the-top cool, but it also drew attention to the ugly, uncovered generators sitting in front of the grill. Using 1-in.-thick wood planks, we built a 3 x 3 x 2-ft., hinged “ammo box” accented with matte-green paint, rope handles and stenciled lettering to complete the realistic look. The front and rear bumpers also needed TLC; Media 1’s paint department stripped and prepped them both for matte-black paint, making sure to treat all rust with Ospho rust inhibitor and primer.
Lead painter Rene Mendez got carried away – he airbrushed some rust elements on the front clip, and painted inside the gas filler and around all the lights, as well as the previously yellow windshield wipers.
One hurdle remained: those two rusted, dirty propane tanks bolted to the back bumper. Steve finished the job and constructed aluminum “bomb fins” that attached around the tank knobs! We painted the tanks and fins with matte green, yellow stripes and stenciling that finalized our homemade propane bombs!

Victory!
The craziest thing of all? We finished all this in the designated timeframe! Neal and Cornell returned on Friday to pick up their brand new, custom “Bombermobile”. It debuted on Saturday night, and Kenny & Denny’s reported the biggest revenue event in company history! Who wouldn’t want to try a pulled-pork sandwich from this truck?
Kenny & Denny’s also offers discounts and free add-ons for all veterans. What a great idea to complement your wrap – recognizing those who’ve served!
We tend to get a little out of hand with one-of-a-kind jobs like this; it required quite a bit more labor than we anticipated. But, the transformation from the truck’s original state to the finished product provided all the justification we needed. Bombs away!
 

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