Food on Wheels

Michael Hufana, owner of Original Mobile Graphics (OMG, www.omgwraps.com) in Stockton, California, was a vehicle-wrap customer before he was a provider.

“In 2001, I was living in Los Angeles,” he recalls. “I bought a Cadillac Escalade, but I couldn’t afford it, so I got advertising on it.” Fast forward to 2006, when Hufana and his brother bought a Mimaki JV3 solvent ink printer and began wrapping food trucks. “I’ve done probably 30 or 40 food trucks,” he says. “I started doing them in LA and then brought the business up here. Down there it was all taco trucks – I used to do a lot of taco trucks.”

More recently, Hufana purchased an HP Designjet L26500 latex printer, and the first job on the new printer was another food truck: a Puerto Rican food truck business named Borinquen opearting in the San Francisco Bay Area. “My brother does graphic design in the Bay Area,” explains Hufana, “so he knows a lot of people that need design work, and he knew the people that owned the Borinquen truck.”

Hufana’s brother designed the artwork for the truck, and they printed it on 3M 180 CV3 Controltac film with 8518 gloss overlaminate via the HP 26500. The job required six vertical panels on each side, two on the top, and two on the back. Both sides have windows, so they also printed panels on Clear Focus perforated window film.

The mix of materials does cause some color-matching problems, says Hufana: “You’re losing 60 percent of the color” on the perforated film,” he says, “but I let the customer know.”

Well before the actual installation, though, there’s prep work to be done. “The food trucks are all from 1987, 1989,” says Hufana. “The business owners buy them old, so they’re pretty beat up. We do a little bodywork – we sand it, we get all the imperfections out, we Bondo it.”

ORIGINAL MOBILE GRAPHICS
www.omgwraps.com