Last night, I cut a checkerboard stencil for a payload bay. I would have cut vinyl to apply directly, but I haven't found bright or fluorescent orange vinyl anywhere around here. I have it in paint, so I figured I might as well try out a Cricut stencil to see how it fares. Here's the stencil applied over the white payload section, and that's regular masking tape above and below the stencil:
Not bad. I did have a little overlap on the stencil pattern. Overlap was 0.056" on the aft square and 0.039" on the forward square- so and average of 0.048" and off the vertical alignment by about 0.15°. The overlap is visible on the left side of the blue square with wording shown above. I did not measure the stencil after cutting to see how close it was to the size plugged into the Cricut software. Stencil width was specified as 12.799". So using that, +0.048" is only ~ 0.4% off. I may have stretched it a little while applying it. Hmm, now that I think about it, the total OD for that size was determined with the measured painted tube thickness, the measured stencil thickness and the published tube ID of 3.9". It's surprising that is was that close in the end.
I put the top strip of masking tape on first and used it as a guide, laying the forward edge of the stencil down against that. This was done by eye. After sticking a couple of squares down gently, I did pull it off and shift it a couple of times before committing to a position.
With this method instead of using colored vinyl, I was mostly curious how the stencil would seal around the edges. You can see bubbles in the vinyl above, being clear is an advantage for that. First, I went around all edges to be sure there were no bubbles that might compromise the edge seal. Bubbles in the middle were of no consequence, so they were left alone. I gave it a couple of light coats of the base white to seal them, spraying from all angles to cover the edges well.
After spraying a few coats of orange and letting it dry to the touch for an hour or two, I carefully pulled the masking tape off the top and bottom of the pattern:
That went well, so I went around all of the edges of the pattern with a razor blade to release the vinyl squares. Somewhere during this tedium, I decided that simply applying colored vinyl squares and being done would be a better way of doing this. Then, I carefully lifted off a square. It came off clean, so I tried another.
It was clean around the stencil and the paint wasn't peeling up with it, so the rest came on off:
The bottom line is that the stencil vinyl did a better job than the masking tape at the top and bottom of the pattern, as the picture above shows. I would use this method again if colors desired weren't available in vinyl and that was important to me. This fluorescent orange looks much better than the oranges I have in vinyl. I'm glad I chose this route.
Paints are Krylon Specialty Appliance Epoxy white, and Krylon Industrial Tough Coat fluorescent orange. The light sealing coat of white and the orange coats were all applied today over the course of 2-3 hours, and the tape and stencil were pulled off another hour or so afterwards.
Again- next rocket, I'll be more likely to use a decal rather than stencil and paint. This one is okay, it came out good enough for this rocket. Rings in contrasting vinyl will be added above and below the pattern to close it off. However, I still have the bottom of this rocket to do and want it to match, so I'll be doing this at least one more time.