RV-7 has been flying since November, about 100 hours on it now. Initially my plan was to vinyl wrap the whole thing. However, I ran into issues on the really tight curves around the cowling inlets and the tips of the horizontal stab, elevators, vertical stab, and rudder. After fully covering those, I was not happy with the results and peeled it off. Sent the cowlings, wing tips, wheel pants, vertical stab, rudder, horizontal stab, and elevators off to a real paint shop and had them professionally painted.
The rest of the aircraft including, the wings, flaps, ailerons, fuselage, and all fairings are fully wrapped in 3M 1080 Gloss White. The 3M white is extremely bright. Did not realize how bright it was until the paint shop tried to match it to matterhorn and other common whites. The wings are wrapped in two pieces each, with a seam about 6 inches behind the leading edge on the bottom. The fuselage is mainly 3 pieces, one left, one right, and one on the belly, with seams on the belly and one directly on the top which is only a couple feet long from the canopy slider track to the empennage fairing.
The stripes and checkers were applied using knifeless tape to mask out the design, then applying 3M 1080 Gloss Sterling Silver, and 3M 1080 Gloss Dark Red. I highly recommend the knifeless tape, this stuff is great. The 3M 1080 vinyl is also great, super forgiving to mistakes and very easy to work with.
The entire vinyl wrap looks good, but isn't perfect (done by a first time vinyl wrapper). The one thing that bugs me is the cowl paint and the vinyl white are a shade off, like i said before, the 3M white is EXTREMELY BRIGHT white. No issues with peeling so far, I flew through some heavy rain and it did chew up a little bit of the vinyl around the windshield, which has since been fixed. Vinyl was applied directly to the bare aluminum skin. I have absolutely no worries whatsoever about the vinyl coming off in flight or corrosion developing underneath. It would be impossible for any air or moisture to get underneath.
Overall, I'm happy with the final result, spent around $1500 on vinyl and it is supposedly lighter than paint, although I have no numbers to prove that. However, if I were to do it again, I would just paint the entire aircraft white and then use knifeless tape to create the vinyl stripes.