Ray’s all carbon Datsun 510 hood is a work of art by itself.  It is feather light, strong, and only a handful of them exist in the world… Let alone here in the US.

When I got started on this hood, I was a bit worried with the quality of image I was going to be able to deliver.  A lot of the images of “The Great Wave” were of average quality, or had poor color reproduction.  I was able to find two seperate images.  One that was of great image quality that I could use, and another that had vibrant coloring…  closer to what the print may have first looked like when it was freshly done in 1832.

I took the high quality image and did some color adjustments in Photoshop to get it closer to the vibrant recreation I had found.  I then vectorized the image, and spent a long time cleaning up the shapes, lines, and curves of the artwork.  Once I had vectorized artwork, I was able to sample colors from the more vibrant image, kind of like a complex paint by numbers.

After measuring the hood, I sized the graphics to fit, and sent it to production.  Printed on 3m IJ180C, with a 3m Lustre overlaminate, and contour cut to shape.

The application may have been the easiest part of the process.  As the hood is mostly flat, it required little use of heat to conform to the shape.  Only a bit was used on the front leading edge.

Ray is still working on completing the 510 this is slated to go on, but joked in the mean time he will be hanging the hood on his wall above his bed as artwork.

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