The new vinyl decals for the new boat name arrived from signspecialist.com. We spent several hours removing the old decals. Halfway through the removing the decals, we realized that if we had renamed the boat from Impulse to Imp instead of Fantasia, the rename would have been easier!
Many people recommend using a hair dryer or heat gun to remove the old decals, however we found it really didn't make the job easier. The best tool was just a fingernail, or a cotter coil if your fingernail wasn't strong enough. If we were lucky, it came off in a sheet. After removing the letters, we cleaned up the adhesive with a razor blade and WD-40. There are lots of recommendations for other products to clean up extra adhesive, but Greg has always found that WD-40 works great.
One minor tip: Take off any rings you are wearing when working on the hull. Greg noticed his wedding ring making marks on the hull.
There is still the image of Impulse on the hull in a dull yellow. The rest of the hull is a bright white. From what we've read, this is normal, and the yellow turns white eventually when exposed to sunlight, although it might take as much as a year. We have noticed the same phenomena where the boat number decals were when we replaced those and the hull is already turning white. It seems counter intuitive that the boat would be yellow underneath vinyl and change to white instead of the other way around, but that is what seems to happen—something about how fiberglass reacts with sunlight.
We have yet to apply the new boat name. I don't know that we will do the whole boat re-naming ceremony written up here, but we should probably do something.
The decals were relatively easy to order. Although signspecialist.com has different parts of the web site for truck decals and boat decals, they are all the same in how they get produced (I asked). The truck decals part of the site allows more customization, allowing uploading fonts and specifying things such as drop shadows and blends. We spent lots of time playing with the colors of the blend to get it right.
The decals came about five days later rolled loosely in a direct mail box. Since we don't have them on the boat yet, we are looking at them through the paper, but they look great. We will see how they go on and hold up soon.
