Does anyone know of a supplier of letters or numbers for lettering and numbering cars. I have bought woodland scenics dry lettering and use only the 1/16 size letters. Right now the other size letters don’t help me. Lettering my hopper cars could prove to be very expensive. I need a full page of dry transfers. I have to pay about seven dollars or so per car right now. Being on fixed income, at this rate my fleet will take apx 2 yrs to letter. I prefer not to use decals.
Chartpak might have something you can use.
I’m a longtime fan of dry transfer lettering, starting with Letraset Alphabet and Numeral sheets. I had assumed them to no longer be around, but a quick google search inspired by your query yielded THIS, and I’m sure that you will find more.
I still have a 133 page Letraset catalogue which lists over 250 typefaces in multiple sizes. While they offered mini-sheets, the ones which I used were 10"x15". Depending on the fonts you wished to use, the typeface could run from 6pt to at least 288pt. Most lettering was available in black or white.
Eventually, I decided to get custom lettering made, and since I had been using dry transfer lettering sets from C-D-S, I went to them for the custom lettering. C-D-S ceased operations several years ago, but their inventory and equipment was purchased by OZARK MINIATURES. (You’ll need to scroll down the page a bit to get the the listings for C-D-S.)
I contacted them yesterday via e-mail, looking for alphabet sets to letter a locomotive, but have not yet heard back from them. I’m trying to match locomotives done previously, so am looking for sets of a particular font, in two different sizes.
They mention alphabet sets as “Letters and Stripes” in the list, but that particular item is not a clickable link like those listings for lettering sets to do particular freight or passenger cars. &nb
I have had good luck with Clover House dry transfers.
Here is the dry transfer menu page:
http://cloverhouse.com/Store/index.php?cPath=64
Hope that helps,
Ed
I found this site with a Google search. It doesn’t say they do custom work, but they have alphabets and freight car data. http://greenwayproducts.com/greenway-products/train-customizing/campbell-dry-transfer-decals/
DIY dry transfers looks like it’s more involved than DIY decals. There are custom DT places, their sites aren’t as MR oriented or user friendly as a Rail Graphics site. http://customrubontransfers.com/ However that doesn’t mean they can’t make what you need. A single color 4x11 sheet is $20.
Graphic design has exploded since the days of my apple 2 computer. Most of what we need as model railroaders is letters. Font, font size and colors are the only variables. Maybe you require a custom logo that would take a iittle design thought, but most of what we would want is pretty simple.
Is there a reason you would not consider custom made screen printed water slide decals?
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-Kevin
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Who does the custom decals? What would be the price range?
Dave’s Decals has some great decals and he will make custom decals. The details for custom decals are on his web site. His website is davart.net or google Daves Decals.
Wayne, I noticed that your pictures are stored on Photobucket. Did you pay to upgrade to allow you to post to 3rd party sites?
I originally, since 2004, had a free account at photobucket, but several years ago, I found that my monthly allotment of bandwidth was being used-up in less than two weeks, with the result that the pictures posted on-line disappeared until the bandwidth was restored.
I didn’t have a clue what bandwidth was, but when I contacted photobucket, it was explained that people viewing the photos was what used the bandwidth. It seemed unusual that this had changed so suddenly, and after I pestered them enough, they sent me a transcript of my bandwidth useage.
Much of it was for this site and for Big Blue, another forum on which I’m fairly active. However, the bulk of it was from sites such as Google, which send out “bots” to search for photos to use when folks like us do searches for pictures of trains. If you type “boxcar photos” into google, chances are you’ll see hundreds of photos, some of which are mine.
It was suggested by photobucket that I open a paid account, and their cheapest option at that time was Plus 20, at around thirty bucks a year: upgraded storage capacity and unlimited bandwidth. That sounded reasonable enough to me, although I didn’t really need more storage capacity (with about 5500 photos stored there, I had used only 11% of the capacity - my photos don’t have a very large file size, as they’re mainly intended for on-line use).
When photobucket sprung their new policy, I was told that as long as I kept my account up-to-date, I would be afforded third-party hosting until Dec. 31st, 2018.
My renewal date was August 1st, but when I attempted to do so, I learned that my credit card had be
Darn, how could I forget Clover House.
I visited Russ at his home, several times before he retired and sold the business.
Wayne wouldn’t getting your own website be more cost effective and reliable?
I dunno…never thought about it, really. I doubt that I could keep it interesting for very long, and I certainly wouldn’t even attempt it on this old computer.
Wayne
I wasn’t thinking of it as a destination site for How To Model, just a depository for pictures.
That’s interesting, as I wasn’t aware of that capability. It may be worth investigating. Thanks for that suggestion.
Wayne
One thing I never could do to my satisfaction (well OK there are dozens of such things, but here is one in particular) and that is use dry transfers on scribed wood siding. The act of burnishing also damaged or changed the wood. For that matter decals on scribed wood siding don’t work all that well for me either.
Dave Nelson
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I was never happy with any results I had with dry transfers. My biggest problem was holding the transfer paper still while I burnished the image. All my stripes ended up crooked, and arched lettering was a nightmare. If you had a letter out of place, you were cooked.
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Decals allow you the ability to reposition the image until you are happy.
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-Kevin
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