Happy New Year Everyone!
Back on Dec. 27, I posted a request for help with home made decals. As usual, you folks came forth with all kinds of great advice. I wanted to share with everyone that the problem is solved.
I’m doing an N scale of the C&O back in the 40’s. Its a semi-prototype location called the Rockfish Valley Subdivision in Virginia. C&O rolling stock and quality steam engines in N scale can be scarce items, so I opted to go for unlettered and make my own decals for some of the engines and rolling stock. I also need to come up with a dozen or so C&O coal hoppers that don’t all have the same numbers.
I bought Inkjet clear decal paper, a Micro Mark decal application kit and software from Rail Fonts. I have MS Word 2010 which has all kinds of options and was able to exactly match the gold lettering for my engines that i wanted to make decals for. Everything worked great until I applied the gold decals to the black engines and I encountered a crisis of contrast. The lettering would not show up. So, I asked for help.
I wasn’t ready to spring $400 or so for a laser printer, so I went with the advice to try white decal paper. I ordered the white paper from Inkjet Decal Paper and while waiting for it to come in, someone recommended the paper form Micro Mark. I ordered it an when it came in, I found it was Inkjet Decal Paper. So, I now have a lifetime supply of white decal paper.
Good old trial and error resulted in the following method for making decals. Using the MS Word 2010 text box feature, I made an approximately 4"x2" box and filled it with black shading. The Word 2010 is capable of an almost infinite range of colors. With a little work I was also able to come up with colors to match some of the rolling stock and use white lettering. This is not all that important because white lettering decals are easy to find. Its the gold