Hello railfans , I want to let everyone who is a owner to a private railroad know that i have a md 5000 alps printer , and do do my own decals here at the Plum-A-Nearly railroad , so i do know it can be done , but this is the deal , my art work is very simple , i can print others art work if it is done down to the right size , so if any one wants some decals made let me know as i use the walthers decal paper with no problems , so hope to help you all soon , KEVIN C.E.O. Plum-A-Nearly Railroad Inc. http://PLUMRRINC.web.com
I just ran across this. Does this ring a bell with anyone on this forum? Is this gentleman still active here? His link no longer works either. Greg [ 09. September 2003, 06:13: Message edited by: Greg Elems ]
Greg, I don't know the person or about his link, but I have seen some recent articles in Model Railroader about printing your own decals. It seems that you can buy decal stock and that certain printers will support color and black and white printing on the decal film. You might check with Kalmbach about when these were published. If I think about it, I will check my files over the weekend when I return from my business trip to Philadelphia. I suspect the big issues are getting the ink to adhere to the more plastic like decal stock and having it not run off when the decals are exposed to water or the other solvents used to transfer and set them. I suspect that you can generate the necessary art work in MS Word, Excel, or Visio, unless you really want to be elaborate. There may also be folks near your town who do decals commercially and may not be too expensive.
Sorry, it isn't ringing any bells If you were looking for a way to do home decals, I've just done one of these: Which involved making the decals, and I used the "Supercal" system. I was fairly impressed. If I get chance i'll post a couple of pics of the results later. [ 09. September 2003, 12:42: Message edited by: Martyn Read ]
I have not heard from Kevin Stroud in a couple years, but I had designed his E-Passes for him a few years ago. His website it still up here: http://www.geocities.com/plumrrinc/plumrrincindex.html As for custom decals, I make my own with an ALPS MD1000 printer, however I heard the ink ribbons have been recently discontinued, so I don't know how long they will still be available.
Image of the completed project as promised. It does actually look better than this, the flash has white-out-ed the decal area's of the model, but I've got no easy way to do a non-flash image here at the moment. [ 10. September 2003, 22:33: Message edited by: Martyn Read ]
Superb Martyn! Memroies of Devorn and Corrrnwall thaarrre Hey, you would consider an N Scale version of those decals, hmmm? Maybe the Ginster's as well? Got a hankerin' for a couple of non-powered 158's... [ 10. September 2003, 23:40: Message edited by: Gats ]
A thank you to all who responded. I haven't really had the time to start looking into making my own decals. There are a couple of people who do custom decal work for a reasonable price that I will farm it out to. Also there is a business here in Reno that makes good decals I've been told. Martyn, very nice modeling and even your picture of the model looks good. Now that I'm getting serious about some WP units, I find that I will need some decals. I think I can digitally make my lettering with out too many problems. It's a matter of sitting down and doing it. Seems like my free time is S scale too. Greg
I'm working on the artwork for the Ginsters at the moment, I need to pick up a second hand 158 to repaint, but I have a spare shell I'm sizing them up on. There are copyright issues which I think stop me from distributing these, but I'm safe doing it for myself from my own artwork, (I believe that's how the law stands over here,) but drop me a line off-list and I will give you some leads on the artwork, which should make it pretty easy.
