First track day - 986 Forum - The Community for Porsche Boxster & Cayman Owners

eslai · 06-11-2005, 08:37 AM

You might want to look into getting some magnetic car numbers. Do a search on google and you'll find a lot of different guys selling them in many different styles.

It's a lot cleaner-looking than creating duct tape or shoe polish numbers!

donv · 06-11-2005, 05:31 PM

Here's my car at NHIS a couple of weeks ago, sporting my home made magnetic numbers. Bought the roll material at a local sign supply place - $12 for 3 ft (2 ft wide). Was able to get 3 ea (front and 2 sides) 3-digit numbers with still plenty left over. They were larger than those on most cars there.

limoncello · 06-11-2005, 05:58 PM

Brucelee - thanks for the tips, I was not aware. Summers here are VERY hot, and I noticed how hot everything was when I came off the track, even in June. I started with tires at 36 psi - after the first run they were 42-47 psi. I will probably skip July/August for that very reason - too hot for car and driver.

donv and eslai - I had bought 2 pieces of magnetic sign stock, but forgot & left them at the house. Also, the school assigns numbers randomly, PCA or SCCA events will have different numbers, so I was going to put the tape on the 1 foot square white blanks. For anyone, how do you get a permanent number assigned, with all the different clubs and cars out there?

Just finished an all day detail job. The protecitive plastic or tape is great - I had no damage to any of the areas I covered, only to the areas I didn't. Wonder what Porsche charge for touch-up paint. Does PPG or somebody have cheaper alternatives?

Finally got the sand out of the carpet. Quit using my shop vac and got the wife's good vac with all the right attachments. Took a while, but the sand is gone.

donv · 06-11-2005, 06:02 PM

Here's a close-up of the numbers, off the car. If case anyone's interested in making your own, here's what I did:

Found a font I liked. Funny how many fonts have great looking letters and crappy numbers! Created a file on my computer with one number per page, printed them and then taped them together. Cut out the outline, but left a 1" wide strip to hold them together at the top and bottom edges. Cut out the interior openings between the numbers and the connecting strips.

Using the paper pattern, traced the inside/outside edges onto the magnetic material with a ball point pen. Cut on the lines with a regular pair of good scissors, being sure to leave the connecting strips.

Using a Sharpie (permanent fine point marker), colored in the "negative" of the numbers where the connecting strips were left and any places where it was too small to cut out the material.

Also created a few other numbers to add at the start or end of the 427 in case I'm not as consistently lucky in having the same number be open for each event. Ones use little material and a 6 can be flipped for a 9...

eslai · 06-12-2005, 10:15 PM

Very nice, although my preference is for numbers in a box like this:

http://protapesigns.com/images/71BSP.jpg

Follows along with a lot of club regulations.

Limoncello--a lot of groups that run HPDE days don't care what number you use as long as no one else has it that day. All of the ones I've ever ran with just let me register whatever number I wanted. It helps if you don't choose a common number of course.