Hi everyone!
We are a rookie team and are finishing our bumpers. We wanted to ask some established teams how they put their number on their bumpers, if you guys use paint or make stickers.
Thanks!
Fabric paint, embroidery, and iron on’s seem to be most popular. Anyone out there do it differently?
We use fabric paint and it seems to work well.
Fabric paint would be best 
We cut out the numbers in cordura…and then put a white outline behind them…in cordura… and sew that to the bumper…
The contrast really helps
We also use bumpers that fold over so we don’t have to ever take them off (except for inspection)
The fabric folds one way to be red and the other way to be blue… velcro holds it in place…
in another thread team 148 made a stencil and colored it in with a silver sharpie.
We use paint. It worked really well for us.
We cut numbers out of a different color cordurra (we use yellow, which contrasts nicely) and sew them on. It’s a lot of work and takes a lot of precision, but it looks nice. You can see it from a distance here: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/35270
Just PLEASE don’t use black as the color for your numbers, whether you use paint or fabric. It doesn’t contrast well with the blue. White is a lot clearer. The people watching the webcast (and the scouts in the stands) will thank you.
last year we had the bright idea to sew red numbers on our blue bumpers and blue on the red ones, bad idea,it was very hard to see. a light color is very important.
This year we had our students screen press our bumpers using fabric paint. In the past we have laid out an outline for the numbers using a sharpie and a stencil and then painted in with fabric paint. It is a little more time consuming but they come out looking good.
Yes… we do that.
More info: http://blog.iamjvn.com/2011/02/jvn-build-tip-team-numbers.html
We send our bumper fabric in to the company that prints our t-shirts and get them screened on in white.
We use a stencil and white paint on red/blue fabric.
Ditto that last year (and that’s our plan again this year). It cost us something like $4 per bumper if I recall correctly. The silkscreened numbers held up wonderfully for two regionals and the Championship.
Just be sure that the numbers don’t come off easily. The bumpers do see a lot of action, and I’ve seen sewn-on numbers get ripped off, and painted numbers scraped off. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to bring a little paint with you to touch up the numbers.
(MOE uses stenciled bright green numbers with black outlines)
When I saw JVN’s method, I was slightly embarrassed that we go through more trouble to have less cool looking numbers.
Anyway, we have ours embroidered by one of the printing shops in our school. They hold up fairly well, but by the end of the off-season we’re usually missing at least half of one number.
Andy Mark sells iron on numbers:
http://www.andymark.com/SearchResults.asp?Cat=253
My team is using them and so far they have worked pretty well. Just make sure you iron them on as much as possible so they don’t peel off.