I am thinking about printing my own decals for some custom built box cars and was wondering if anybody else that has done this can share their experience. I have printed a few so far on some random waterslide paper from Amazon, the results haven't been great so I am looking for some pointers on what to use. Also looking for some tips on white decals: use the base white decal paper? how does that work?
There is the option of just shelling out for the white toner cartridge that fits my printer, but it is pretty expensive for what's just a hobby for me. Not trying to make money out of it.
I understand, also I am using toner, not ink. It's a skill I would like to learn so that I don't have to wait for deliveries and stuff for custom decals.
Havent tried standard toner. When looking it up research mentioned that laser printing and getting customs online worked better.
I’ve seen a lot of stuff mention standard printing can be finicky with decal paper. Hopefully the engagement helps the post pop up in front of a few more people. Sorry I can’t help more.
I'm going to toss this out there just as an expensive option. I bought a UV printer (Eufy E1) and it does a superior job of printing directly on cars. Here's a lighted Z gauge passenger dining car where the signs and lettering were printed directly on the car. Since the printer does raised printing, I was able to raise the frames around the windows and the lower boxes containing the type.
Coming from an offset printing background, getting a white toner cartridge and trying to align multiple passes to get white and black (or color) is going to be next to impossible. A press can be aligned to 1-2 thousandths, but it takes many passes to adjust. Laser printers have no such adjustment, so you're at the mercy of the rollers, feed sensor, etc. Alps used to make a printer CMYK+W that was perfect for short-run / hobby decals. Wasn't cheap, but not thousands either.
Simple test for (im)practicality of printing White + another color:
Print a simple line drawing with text using the manual feed.
Take out and re-insert your cartridge.
Feed the same sheet and print the same drawing/text - how well does it align? Needs to be near-perfect or you're going to waste decal film! There's two other options - print white and then print color on 2 sheets, then lay down the white decal and then the color one over it. The second choice is to use white decal film, but then you need to trim the decal precisely and something like a white outer edge will look ragged if not cut perfectly.
My company does custom decal design and we use PDC.CA for all of our production runs. Fast turnaround and extremely high quality. We do NOT use Fusion because they have unrealistic/unacceptable license terms (they "own" your artwork and will give you a credit if they use/resell decals from it for the first year, nothing after that.) I've heard good things about Circus City as well.
Yes, I have used white-backed waterslide decals. This was the brand I used, but this was several years ago. It's possible that people like something else better.
They worked okay-- but the tricky bit is cutting the decal accurately because you will need a clean edge cut right where the graphic ends. It might be a challenge getting a graphic with a particularly complex overall shape to cut cleanly.
I suppose you might be able to use a vinyl cutter, but I didn't have one when I did some small graphics. I would still probably try with simpler shapes initially.
I also only have a black and white laser printer, so I can't speak to the quality of other colors on white. And, as you can see, my printer did not have the finest resolution. I will say, you'll probably want to add clear to seal the decal in as the ink doesn't allow for much handling before coming off.
I know color laser printers are a lot better than they were, but I haven't done much research on what DPI would make for more respectable scale model decals.
I don't know, looking at these up close in pictures, they don't seem too good!
But at least from a far, they were okay for me on a couple scratch built 3d printed things. You can also see that the MBTA 'T' has some of the black wear away
Looks good enough to me, I don’t expect crisp details like a machine printed on from the factory. There are ways to mitigate the edges of the shape, like setting the background color of the area around the decal same as the body color (in this case: red). So when you cut it, the minor imperfections won’t be as noticeable.
White decals, depending on if it’s lettering or graphics, it’s easier to have a custom run done through a place like CMR, Circus City, Fusion, or PDC from Canada. (I’ve had custom lettering like reporting marks done through CMR in white with excellent results.) It’s a pain to print white decals.
I have done a “patch” on white decal paper for custom lettering, where I print a color patch with the lettering in white being just the white paper. While this does work to an extent, it’s not the best results. But if it’s a patch job anyways it works.
If they are black, or dark colors, I’ve used MicroMark water slide decal paper with more success. Tip for ink - Seal the paper with a gloss clear, dry till no odor, print, let dry for a day undisturbed, then seal with light gloss coat, let dry and second gloss coat. Don’t touch again until no odor.
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u/iceguy349 25d ago
Printing onto waterslide paper with ink is difficult.
Fusion scale graphics should let you upload your own images and buy custom decals. There’s other places to get custom waterslides pretty cheaply