Looking for advice on suggested thickness of vinyl to do a helmet wrap. I’m super bored this offseason and want to play around with this. My sone doesn’t take good enough care of his helmet for a paint job, and I’m attempting to do this on his current helmet.
Any advice or experiences would be appreciated.
I’ve tried it. All I can say is good luck. Get a good heat gun and set aside some time.
I’ll see if I can find the full wrap I did for someone. It was a real pain. Especially since it was a printed design. If you doing solid color it will be easier, but you will probably need to break it into the sections.
Any standard thickness car wrap vinyl you find would do the job.
My plan is to do solid colors and come up with a design that creates sections vs 1 piece. I have all winter, and I’m sure I’ll make lots of mistakes. Thankfully vinyl is cheap. Any details I’ll print with a cricut and put over the top.
Attempted the helmet wrap today. Watched a bunch of YouTube videos which made it seem very possible to accomplish this task. . .
It was an epic failure. I’d probably be less frustrated if I punched myself in the balls a few times.
It felt like a needed 5 hands to accomplish this. I even asked my wife for help, and it was not helpful.
Of well. The long winter continues ……
Not to say I told you so… 
You are fighting compound curves which just suck for laying vinyl. You have to constantly stretch it and keep it in tension since you can’t compress the vinyl. This is why my sticker kits are so broken up into many elements. I’d like a more cohesive design with more coverage, but a single element has a size to pain in the ass factor to account for.
I once tried to put some skating stickers on my helmet and it was a mess. Even the little ones.
The substrate has to be dimensionally pliable to deal with compound curves. That’s want makes Clayton’s sticker kits so lovely… they are easy to work with because the substrate isn’t rigid.
Speaking of which…
@KeslerDesignWorks my suit is getting closer to being done… lets make me a new helmet sticker kit when it’s done!
The other thing that seems to love compound curves is “hydro-dipping”.
You can see all sorts of very gratifying videos of folks using the dipping technique to apply decorations to complex curves. A very specific look, tho.
But the youtube videos made it seem easy! 
I also wonder about the quality of film I bought from Amazon. I got 3 colors, and they were each VERY different.
The ONLY way to do a full wrap on a helmet would be to get proper, brand-name car wrap vinyl. The cheap stuff on Amazon is mainly for like scrapbooking or indoor usage. I buy some specialty vinyls off Amazon (like holographic or chrome), but nothing that’s going to need to stretch and warp too much.
For car wrapping, Oracal makes some good stuff and it’s what I used on my helmet decal kits and what I use when I need to make decals under paint jobs. It’s like $500 a roll though, and not available in small pieces.
Stop by a local sign shop and see if they have a color you are after sitting on the shelf. The big names like Avery-Dennison, Oracal, or 3M are what you are after. Preferably with “air release”.