printing decals

Of course it can be done, others have already done it :o)

Basically, you have three options:

1) Have a dedicated decal printer, such as Fantasy Printshop do the printing for you 2) Buy the equipment and possibly start a decal printing business yourself (expensive!!) 3) See if you can find an ALPS/OKI/Roland printer (or similar)

The only realistic option to produce 'professional' decals is to contact a specialist printer. There are a few around, but I think Fantasy Printshop does an excellent job and they have reasonable minimum order quantities. Be prepared to invest a couple of hundred dollars/pounds, though.

The ALPS option is possibly cheaper, but has a lot of limitations - especially in the number of colors that can be faithfully reproduced with great detail. Inkjets and lasers can help with some colors but cannot print white or silver, etc.

In either case, you must be prepared to work in a graphics program such as CorelDraw or similar. A photo editing program will generally not cut it.

Sten Sundelin Flying Colors Aerodecals

I thought the ALPS printers were now OOP??? Thermal wax printers are becoming rarer by the day.

-- David Miller

"There are no average pilots in the Israeli Airforce."

and my trusty,dusty Lexmark Z-51 inkjet printer for very good to excellent results. They might be a tad below the professional version, but they sure didn't set me back a couple of hundred quid either. The best results, like most things in life, come with practice perseverance and a touch of creativity. Good Luck Mike IPMS

I'll say yes. I don't think you can do homemade decals that equal the BEST from commercial sources, but there is a lot of variation in quality, so you can probably do better than the worst.

Printing decals with an inkjet printer leads to some problems. Ways around the problem include a laser printer and a copy shop.

I have a black laser (very cheap these days) and a color inkjet. I print black decals directly from the laser printer. For color decals, I do a color printout on regular paper, and take the printout and a sheet of decal paper to a copy shop. They stick the decal paper in the single sheet feed, and copy the color image to it. The latest package of decal paper I got includes a document to show to copy shops stating paper unaffected by printer heat.

Even decals pr>

Although I don't have first hand knowledge but have seen the results on HHMB, Testor's decal printing set looks OK and is much cheaper

-- Chuck Ryan snipped-for-privacy@REMOVEearthlink.net Springfield OH

Bare-Metal foil makes a decal sheet that can be run through an inkjet printer but there are 2 problems, the inkjets isn't as sharp with detail like the decals sets are, and to get any white to show on the decal you have to use thier white decal paper, which means very precise trimming of the decal unless the white is on the edges

Just ignore the software that comes with it....