In The Works

Applying trailer-side graphics is no less an art than creating the visuals themselves. It might take two people with deft hands and ample patience more than a day to fully dress a trailer, making sure panels of vinyl, ink, and adhesive align just right despite rivets and rough spots on the trailer’s skin.

But at an impressive demonstration in August, a revolutionary new graphics applicator from 3M Commercial Graphics “rolled” a one-piece, 48-foot-long full-color picture along the right side of a trailer from rear to front in about one minute. A second pass with the top half of the picture followed five minutes later, aligning the colorful graphic perfectly with the bottom half. You had to be within three feet even to see the seam. The trailer could be ready to roll in about four hours.

Charles Calisto, 3M fleet graphics marketing manager, says about 42% of over-the-road trailers have no graphics of any kind, and that a lower-cost application might make trailer-side advertising a viable business strategy. The new applicator also can be used on soft-sided trailers and to apply traditional four-color cut graphics. The company plans to have applicators in the marketplace by third quarter of 2002.

As for the sticky task of removing graphics, 3M is developing an alternative head for the applicator to help strip off the old stuff, also an expensive and time-consuming manual job today.