Easy. Chill your vodka or gin with ice. Strain into a martini glass. Look at a bottle of vermouth somewhere across the room, but by all means DO NOT pollute your martini with the stuff. Add some olives on a stick. Enjoy.
Now adding Martini stripes using automotive vinyl wrap (sticker type stuff but looks like paint) to your car may be a tad more involved.
Here's what you'll need
You can find places to pre-print your vinyl with the stripes. Its not cheap. I thought about doing that. But my car is off the beaten path in terms of shape with the targa top, so most pre-cut items would need modification. And I wanted some freedom to see what would look good as I went along. I went the dreaded custom route. That meant two layers of vinyl: the base blue and then the stripes on top - red in center and two light blue stripes on each side. Trying to find the relationship of the sizes of the stripes was an early challenge. There are some guides out there but I found mostly inspiration from them rather than real information. I decided to do a one-foot-wide blue stripe down the middle. Then my red stripe would be 3" centered. Martini seems to get a little tricky with the sizes and spacing of the light blue stripes. The two closest to the center appear to be spaced a bit more closely than the outer two. I made both stripes 1" wide. But the inner pair are spaced only 1/2" from the red stripe. The outer pair are spaced 3/4" from the inner pair. So there is a gradual increase in the spacing - very tricky stuff. And a pain to measure.
On eBay, I found a nice company that sells smaller cuts of automotive vinyl (both directly and on eBay itself) so I grabbed two 1'x5' rolls of a gloss blue for the base. Then I got one roll each of 1'x5' lengths in screaming red and light blue. Each roll was about $20. After watching a great video on how to apply vinyl, I thought I might need some of the way cool curve-cutting knifeless tape. Turns out I really didn't. So let me know if anyone wants some. I did try it out and its not quite as easy as it looks in the video.
You'll want to clean the car intently wherever your stripes will go. I found rubbing alcohol worked pretty well. Watch out for any plastic or rubber areas though with that stuff. You're basically pulling off any wax you have on the paint. And the dirt and grime. You'll want it perfect if you want the vinyl to be smooth and well-adhered.
I clearly had lots of cutting ahead of me so I needed something that would cut straight lines really, really well. Having been to art school, I had a mat cutter lying around that has been ridiculously handy over the years. I got a vertical cut knife for it (versus the bevel cut you normal do when cutting mats for framing art) and its been awesome. The guide bar I have is only two feet long so its great for shorter cuts but longer ones require some fiddling to make sure they each line up.
The most critical bit that no one really clued me in on as well as they should have was the masking tape. The green "frog tape" is the best stuff ever. Don't mess with lesser stuff. Not worth it. Making this many stripes and having to line them all up was made possible with little bits of masking tape all over the place. You want the good stuff.
Mixing and Pouring
If you want to put stuff down the middle, you need to find the middle first. I painstaking measured many spots on the car, marking the center line with my frog tape diligently. Then I realized that lots of things are already in the middle for reference. Your rear view mirror. Hood badge. I had some bits on the back of my car that were centered. Had I connected those dots with tape, I might have been a tad quicker and had a smoother center line. But I was pretty diligent and came up with the same result the hard way.
A real "top tip" that I found was that once I found the center line, I could measure off that to find where the sides of the vinyl stripe should go. The tape on the sides acted as a nice guide when going to lay out the stripe since it was raised a little off the paint. So if I did enough points on the outside, the stripe would lay down right in the groove of the tape bits. The big blue stripe was easy to place but tough to apply smoothly. Generally, the bigger the bit of vinyl you are trying to lay down, the greater the chances that you'll end up with creases and bubbles under it. You are applying something flat to a curved surface and something is going to give. I've heard that heat can make the vinyl a tad more compliant and hug the curves better. I didn't have time for that level of perfection. I prefer to be driving my car, TYVM!
One thing I learned from Mighty Car Mods is that you want to clean under the hood (bonnet) since the wrap will go around and under too - and it needs to stick there. Same for trunk (boot) and any other spots that may not be visible but will get stuck with vinyl. Once the blue stripe was down, at least I didn't have to worry about finding the center anymore. I could measure from the sides of the stripe to get it whenever I needed to. And for the red stripe, I needed to a lot. The tape again was the key. Another "top tip" is that you can keep using the bits of tape for each stripe. No need to keep pulling more off. Once one stripe is down, move the tape bits out of the way, measure your next location and reuse the little suckers. Saves lots of time.
As I said, getting the light blue stripes in place was a little trickier. If I had 1/2" and 3/4" thick frog tape, my life probably would have been much easier as I could have used it instead of having to measure all the spots. But why make things too easy? So I measured. And I measured. And I measured. Having a small metal ruler for these bits was very helpful. The thinner stripes were far easier to apply straight and bubbles were virtually non-existent. So at least there was that.
I stopped with the bonnet. And it looks great. But it was lonely and needed more. Doing the back was _very tedious_ with the fins over the engine bay and all. For the glass roof, I skipped the blue base and just did the red and light blue stripes. I wanted to let more sun through. And I need to see through it to see behind me when the roof is open. I don't think anyone has even noticed the difference yet.
So there you have the tools and the process to make yourself a nice, dry Martini! Now drive it like you stole it! And park it next to a bunch of folks who will clearly look admiringly and probably somewhat jealously on all your hard work.
