I’m thinking I have a bunch of engines that I need to letter in road names no one makes: Northwestern Pacific and California Western. And of course I don’t have an Alps printer.
So what I’m thinking is to white out a square about the size of the lettering on the loco and using my laser printer, do reverse lettering, printing the black on clear so the white shows through. Then you weather the engine to blend in the colors.
We use the Epson printers that use the Dura-Bright (oil based inks) and they work very well. We print on the white decal paper that is available.
We have printed Conrail color background and reverse print the white letters. Getting the correct shade of background color is the problem.
The only other problem is when you cut the decal out it leaves a white edge because of the white decal paper it was printed on. But we weather the car and it hides a lot of the white.
Chip, another option for you to consider is the generic decal words from Champ (if they are still available). They offer (or used to offer) a bunch of different individual decal words that you could string together to make a freelanced name (or, in my case at the time, a prototype that had no commercial decal sets).
Bob H. Since you’re using the Epson, do you have to spray your decals with setting solution before using them? I dont think you have to due to the type of ink it is, but havne’t ever proved it.
Kevin
You might want to consider investing in an Epson inkjet that uses durabrite inks. I paid $70 for mine at Staples and it has served me quite well, doing the kind of stuff that BobH was talking about. The numbers on the cab of my model CSX road slug were done this way using the Testors White decal sheets.
If you’re doing white lettering on a black locomotive, the Champ sets should work, at least for everything but “California”. That could probably be pieced together from other words on the sheet. You could also use alphabets, either decals or dry transfers. If you’ve got a lot of engines to do, you could get custom lettering made up, although this can be expensive unless you need to do hundreds of locos, or if you need other lettering, like for freight cars, that you could also have included on the same sheet. When I first started painting and lettering diesels for my Elora Gorge & Eastern, I lettered over three dozen of them using Champ alphabet sets. I also did over 80 diesels for a local hobby shop: at the time there was no correct lettering available and no alphabets in anything close to the correct colour for the Toronto Hamilton & Buffalo Ry., so I painted the diesels in the correct colour for the lettering, then used dry transfer alphabets to spell out the roadname. I then masked off the body area that was to remain the same colour as the lettering, painted the second colour right over the dry transfers, and when the paint had set, removed the masking and the dry transfers. Voila! Properly coloured lettering. C-D-S later came out with dry transfers in the proper colour and nowadays, you can buy this paint scheme rtr from LifeLike Canada as part of their Proto2000 line.
Wayne