A friend and I applied the tape last week. Here's what we did and what we learned.
We made a mark at the front and back of the hull where we wanted the waterline to run. Then we adjusted the boat until it lines up with a grading laser level I borrowed from another friend. After that we used a 3" wide piece of blue painters tape to act as a guide tape. We could easily reposition this until we were happy. The laser was nice but probably not really needed. Use a wide (>2") tape help keep things straight, a narrower tape would bend too much.
Once we had the guide tape down we'd go about putting the vinyl tape on. We put on 2 stripes, 1 1.5" blue stripe and a .75" yellow below that. I found that a little squeegee really helped get the tape on w/o so many bubbes. My squeegee was actually a lid to a small plastic container, nothing fancy. i would hold the tape up against the guide tape and lay it down with the squeegee/lid. Something I learned after the 3rd stripe (we did inside and outside of both hulls) is that when you start to drift off the guide tape a little you're better off leaving it than pulling it back up to fix it. The tape will actually stretch a little when you do and you can see the "wow" in the tape when you look down the hull.
Once we put the top stripe on we went back with some .75" blue tape against the first vinyl stripe and used it to guide the 2nd.
It came out looking pretty darn good and I'm really happy with the result. Here's a couple pics of where I'm at so far:
-Eric
edit - I tried using the img tags for the photos instead of url tags but got the red X instead, what did I do wrong?
Edited by efinley on Aug 08, 2011 - 10:04 PM.