In my MicroMark catalog, they showed off their decal system sporting white custom lettering on a boxcar.
Other than the Alps printer, has any one solved the white letter conundrum?
Supposedly there is an Okidata printer that does white, but I haven’t seen much about it recently.
I’ve done it in a few cases where the white was surrounded by darker colors by painting a white background onto the car first, therefore the white would show through the clear areas of the decal.
You can go low tech/high quality by silk screen printing them. You print your decal design on paper (black lettering) and use photo-sensitive screen printing to print the decals on decal paper, using white ink. After the ink dries, you finish them as usual.
For $50 you can get supplies to make enough decals to last a really long time:
http://www.reuels.com/reuels/Speedball_Value_Pack_Fabric_Screen_Printing_Kit.html
For a one off, probably Jeff’s suggestion of a dark decal over a white background would be best. If you need a number of the decals, a custom printer like Rail Graphics may be the way to go.
http://www.railgraphicsdecals.com/
Other than that it’s probably buying decal or dry transfer lettering sets and doing it letter by letter. You can apply dry transfers to clear decal film.
I’ve achieved pretty good results using opaque white background decal paper (Evan Designs paper in my case) and printing the decal background to match the car color. Set up a rectangular background in a color as close to the car body color as possible, then type white lettering over the colored background. Since the printer can’t print white, it doesn’t print anything where the lettering occurs, leaving the white background showing through the colored background giving you the desired white lettering. I have found that the real trick to matching the car body color is to print a row of multiple small square background “color chips” along one edge of the decal paper. Each “chip” should be a slightly different shade of the color you are trying to match. Compare the chips to the car body, note the chip with the best match, then print your decals using that color chip shade as your background. Note that this must be done on the actual decal paper since a test print on plain paper will produce subtle but noticeable differences in the color shades. A color match from the plain paper test printout may not even be close when printed on the actual decal paper.
I got a really good color match by scanning the target surface on my flatbed scanner. Then I extracted a portion of the image and used that to color in the background. By pasting in a swatch of the original with many individually-colored pixels, I avoid the monocromatic look that makes the color match difficult.
I’m lucky that I have an ALPS printer but I’ve often thought that the approach outlined here would be one way to get around the problem for those w/o one. Since I have a hard time seeing white letters on the light decal paper, I have sometimes used a light outline of the car color on the decal to help in cutting them out. It works well for that too… even if you can print white.
dlm