What is the secret for making decals, I have an inkjet printer but the decal design disolves when submerged in water.
It is the Testors white paper. Which I am using to make a white letter outlined in a black background. It sounds too simple - but I can’t make it happen when I print the decals from my HP.
Help…
Eric
The Decal Dilema! Unless you are printing decals onto a white background your chances for success are nil. I tried and tried then cried and then had mine done proffessionaly. The problem with printers the ink is thin and does not show up well on dark backgrounds. To prove my point make an over head transparency and then lay it on the side of your Red oxide Boxcar and you’ll see there isn’t enough pigment to show up on a dark background.
The only way around that is having a printer like an Alps that can lay down white ink first then the coloured ink over top and over lapping.
Sorry…
After saying all this not all is lost as you can make some really good window signs for your store fronts by printing onto the decal paper then transfering the decals to the window.
Fergie
Eric
You need to seal the printed decal before puting it in the water. Inkjet printers use water based inks and thus the problem you are encountering. If you coat the decal with a clear paint such as Krylon cristal coat, Microscale decal fixer or testors glosscoat it may help. As Fergie also eluded to, inkjet printers do not print with a fully opaque color. They need the white from the underlying paper to make the color work. Even the alps printers suffer from this problem. The advantage that Alps printers have though is the ability to print a solid white image under the color to make it work. Before you start searching for a white ink for your inkjet printer, don’t. This issue has been researched to death on both this forum as well as several forums dedicated to printing decals and white ink for an inkjet simply does not exist.
Dan Pikulski
www.DansResinCasting.com
One option is to use a logo or lettering color other than white. Gold is a viable alternative. If your background color is light, you could go with a darker color for your logo or lettering. A lot of roads used a stripe on their diesels and then lettered over it.
Another solution is to lay two decals on top of each other. Of course, you would have to be using a very thin film or two decals would cause a lot of buildup.
As peviously mentioned, you also have to seal the decals before you soak them to keep them from running.
I used gold letters on a black background for some of my older loco’s, and the ones that had been painted in the “new” paint scheme got a black background with a red banner and white letters. It came out pretty good, but I was using a very high quality erox Phaser 8200 DP printer.
Anyways, let us know how it turns out for you. [8D]
As mentioned above, print your decals on the white decal paper then trim closely and they will appear much nicer on dark surfaces. Alway seal them with something, I use Krylon to seal them. Lots of window type signs I will print on clear decal paper or on something that is already white. I use an Epson photo printer, I get good results. I do alot of truck decals as well as my " Texas Mining and Industrial " shortline.
Not having used decal paper myself at this point, but since I do a lot of professional photo printing, a few points
1.The thinner the pigment or dye, in the end the better the picture. The latest generation of photo printers are actually advertising how tiny the print heads are.
Combne the tiny print head with the greatest possible dots per inch and that is how you get detail. (There are actually long debates on photo forums on what a maxium dpi is necessary -won’t go into it here).
Experiment with paper settings and print speed. The problem described sounds rather like what happens when I use a plain paper setting as a test print… It appears grainy and transpaent. A photo quality print setting at low speed is best.
If you can afford it (starting at $500 US) get a pigment based photo printer rather than a consumer level dye printer. The pigment based print inks are designed to last longer than dye, aiming at the quality of an old dark room print.
Also pigment photo printers have a cartridge for each colour which is expensive up front but cheaper in the long run because you don’t have to throw out the entire cartridge if you run out of one colour.
Experiment with the advanced printing options in the software supplied by the manufacturer (I use Epson photo printers) by printing on plain paper. That can affect the actual colour of the out put. There are in fact a large number of books available on this subject so again I won’t go into details. On the advanced options on an Epson printer you have a number of different choices not on the main menu.
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Well detailed explanation of photo printing, I have been using bev-bel decal paper and an epson photo printer, set for glossy photo paper, I get great results, the only draw back is the decal film is thicker than a high quality decal like microscale, depending on the application sometimes the edge just won’t disappear.
Just for grins, I took a sheet of decals that the color didn’t come out quite right on and sprayed them with Testors’s dull coat and let them dry over night. It did an excellent job of sealing the ink so it wouldn’t run off the decal when dipped in water.
And now you’re off and running!