I May Have Come Up With A Revolution In Crapcan Race Car Stencil Manufacturing

Everyone, everyone, get over here, I have big news! Big news for the thriving and important cottage industry of making “BRIBED” stencils for cars participating in 24 Hours of Lemons races, which are used to indicate which cars have suitably bribed a Lemons Judge. I’ve been a Lemons Judge in the past, and I’m about to be one again in the near future, at the race in Buttonwillow, California this weekend. As I fully intend to be bribed, I need to have at least one stencil ready so I can mark the car as having done the right wrong thing and bribed a judge.

Normally, I make these stencils like humans have done since Gilgamesh was a pimply teenager: draw it on a scrap of cardboard, and cut it out, slowly, laboriously with an X-acto knife.

This method works fine, but it’s a bit labor-intensive and offers a lot of opportunities for mistakes. Also, the lifespan of a cardboard stencil is fairly limited, as they tend to wear out and tear apart pretty quickly. Clearly, the current state of art of Lemons bribed stencil-making could use some improvement.

Here’s an example of one of my cardboard stencils:

Crude but effective enough. Spray paint through holes in cardboard is hardly a precision medium, but for these purposes, it’s basically fine. Here’s a car sporting a number of various bribed stencils from many races:

Not Betty White there, she’s a decal, and a fine decal she is. I mean the five other illustrations on that hood, those are other bribed stencils, made with effectively the same laborious cut-out method by various Lemons judges.

So, as the race approaches, I realized I should make a stencil, but the truth is I’m just not sure when I’d get the time to just sit down and cut one of these damn things out. There must be a better way, right? Can modern automation help at all here?

The good news is yes, yes, it can! Here was my idea: why not use a 3D printer to make the stencils! As long as I avoid googling “3D printer stencil,” I can convince myself of the vanishingly unlikely idea that I somehow was the first to come up with this notion! Exciting!

By 3D printing a stencil, not only will I get a much more durable plastic stencil, but I can also be doing other things while the 3D printer is drooling out the stencil! All I have to do is design it on the computer, and send it off!

I also thought that I could make far more elaborate and complex stencils than I could make by hand, and with that in mind, I tried to design one that used a sort of halftoning effect that would be absurdly difficult to cut out by hand.

I came up with a stencil idea featuring George Washington in racing goggles and tried to print that:

Yeah, that didn’t exactly work. Maybe a better 3D printer could have printed those fine lines more effectively, but mine wasn’t really up to the task. I’m sure there’s a happy medium where I could find some less fine halftoning that would work, but I decided to just try for something simpler. So I drew a new design right on my iPad and extruded that in 3D:

A little Honda T360 Kei truck with a big cartoon-style moneybag in the bed. That screams “bribed,” right? And by using an image complexity about on par with what one likely could have cut from cardboard, it all seemed to work just fine!

I even added a little handle onto the stencil, though it’s likely not going to keep your hands from getting painted like I hoped.

Still I call this a success! It’s a stencil with far less work! And I can print multiples with minimal effort, and they should all last a lot longer than the cardboard ones!

It’s a revolution! A revolution in the car stencil-making world! Crapcan race car-stencil-makers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your X-Acto knives!

Oh, also, Happy Rosh Hashanah, to those who celebrate! It’s 5786, bitches!