One of the first products we created for fellow Pao owners was a sheet of stickers that aimed to replace the ones that came stuck to the fluffy, metallic material that lines the bonnet. Every Pao we’d seen still had them, but they were usually exhausted, crumpled and hard to read (sounds like us on really busy days) with bits missing or obscured by decades of muck.
While we know that only Japanese-readers would be able to *actually* read them, there’s a comfort in knowing that the information you need is right there with the aid of a smartphone, with diagrams where necessary, should you ever need it. These panels transmit information about the vacuum hose system, specs for setting your ignition timing, a neat guide to topping up your fluids, fan warnings (watch your hands!), emissions, idle speeds and more.
Our first ones were well-intentioned, but could at the time only be printed on a sticker material that LOOKED like aluminium. We used careful hi-res scans of the originals and they were pretty decent, and certainly had a sparkle and freshness to them - we sold out on each of the print runs we did. We added rounded corners to later batches, which looked even smoother - but we were never completely happy with them. The originals were clearly a very fine metal, with some kind of awesome gumption on the back - these things had survived in an automotively hostile environment for 40 years, after all.
We have a lifelong habit of making things difficult for ourselves by our policy of improving things - if we can’t reproduce something exactly the way it was, because of manufacturing techniques, materials availability or limited scale of production, then how can we make it better?
And we also like to get things made right here in the UK - locally, even - if we can. Additionally, over the years we've built up a robust community of engineers, artists, designers, technicians, craftspeople, makers and more, all of whom help each other out and share resources to make a good thing better. Working with people who are specialists in their field is one of the things we've always loved, and doing that has made all of our projects more interesting, more creative and more impactful than they night otherwise have been. Together, those things have become a kind of philosophy.
So we set about finding out what these panels might have been made from, how they were printed, and who could make them? We're fortunate to live in the epicentre of an area rich in automotive design and manufacturing, triangulated by Coventry, Leicester and Birmingham, famous for historic car makers, so we knew someone would be able to reproduce these with production accuracy - we just needed to track them down.
So we set about finding out what these panels might have been made from, how they were printed, and who could make them? We're fortunate to live in the epicentre of an area rich in automotive design and manufacturing, triangulated by Coventry, Leicester and Birmingham, famous for historic car makers, so we knew someone would be able to reproduce these with production accuracy - we just needed to track them down.
For the final iteration of these, Sarah knew they’d need to be screen-printed. This requires a much higher quality of artwork much than that required for a digital or even litho printing, especially where there’s very small type and fine lines. She set about rebuilding the artwork for the labels through a combination of very high resolution scans, font-matching, typsetting and translation, re-drawing parts of diagrams where areas were ambiguous or missing. It was hours of painstaking work, evolving a bit at a time over a few months. Nothing was removed, but we added a colour Nissan logo - not featured on the originals - and a tiny credit for our work on the new versions.
Several samples of materials and quotes were obtained before we settled on a manufacturer based locally, who could not only produce these with an aesthetic authenticity but a technical specification that far outspec’d the original, built for modern driving environments and engine temperatures. The end result is a set of real aluminium panels - not stickers - and crystal-clear artwork, screen-printed in 3 colours with an automotive-grade, hardcore adhesive on the back; a combination of historic accuracy, clarity and bang-up-to date production techniques and materials.
So if you’ve ordered some, thanks for supporting our work, and we hope you'll enjoy them for many years to come! If haven't and would like to investigate, they're in the shop here.
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