A Temu knock-off white Bumblebee, sticker labels, colour printer, and some Photoshop.
Since I first saw the variety of Bumblebee colours on Temu I’ve wanted to grab myself a white one to Herbie up. I didn’t really fancy paying £27 for one though so I chose it for a prize on the Temu “game” Fishland.
I finished feeding those damn fish last week and a few days later a white Bumblebee arrived through the post.
Seeing this Bumblebee arrive carded, in a very convincing ’80s G1 style packaging, was a bit of a surprise. The plastic bubble came away easily, barely marking the card; not that marking the card was a concern for a knock-off.
The rub sticker needed to go because it was going to be in my way. A razor blade run gently underneath soon took care of that. The rub sticker came off intact so I stuck it on my original G1 Bumblebee which has been sitting on my desk for some time now.
Next up was some measuring for the stripe decals. I wanted to make the stripe in a single strip, allowing some excess so I could tuck them into the underside of the body. I used Photoshop to quickly create a canvas of 40px * 850px. Following images of Herbie the Love Bug I found online I opted to create the red line with a width of 10px, the white line a width of 10px, and the blue line being 20px in width. I then printed this onto a glossy label using my HP inkjet printer.
Hmm, what is the font used for Herbie’s ’53’?
I looked at several fonts that t’internet claimed was the correct font but none of them looked quite right. Instead I found an image of the ’53’ that I was happy with so went with that.
Now seemed as good a time as any to test the new thermal label printer I’d just bought. There were four ’53’s in total, the large one on the front, two smaller on each side, and a not quite as large on the back. Along with the numbers I decided to print the sunroof on the label printer too. I’m not that pleased with the sunroof so may end up printing that again on the inkjet at some point.
Deathshead revisited (wtf does that mean?)
It was time for Bumblebee to go to pieces so I could apply the stripe label. I purposely made the stripe longer than it needed to be in order to apply it to the whole body at once. When it is applied I can then cut in the middle of the window openings and tuck the label into the inside of the body. I used a razor blade to cut the ’53’ on the bonnet/feet so that the legs can still move independently.
It was going well until I forgot to apply the sunroof so I had to peel the middle section back off.
Oh yeah, sunroof first. With the roof section removed I applied the sunroof label followed by the roof stripe (again).
Time to put him back together. In true Haynes manual style refitting is the reverse of removal and I’m left with…
I thought about Humbleberbie but it sounds a bit Harry Potter ~
…Herbee.
And, along with his G1 counterpart.
Looks like Bumblebee could do with a trip to the car wash
