How to letter N-scale

Flower Gardener spake thus:

Not silkscreen, which is far too coarse for such fine lettering, but what's generally known as "flexography", or printing with rubber plates. Dunno of any easy way to do this at home.

You can, however, make your own decals with either inkjet or laser printers. There are problems with this process, and you can't "print white" (unless you have an obsolete Alps printer which can do that as well as metallics).

Fake sock puppet, you are wrong. Those don't work for N scale it is too small. Quit telling the dude falsehoods.

____

Steve

" snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com" (aka sockpuppetus curtus) spake thus:

[nothing worth repeating]

Peek-a-boo, "Curt", we see you!

Peek-a-boo, STEVE CAPLE , we see you!

I was involved in this you are a childish troll Steve Caple.

On Feb 23, 12:08 am,STEVE CAPLErote:

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Many of them are printed from silicone pads with machines similar to this:

Some are laser printed.

Bill Bill's Railroad Empire N Scale Model Railroad:

History of N Scale: Railroad Books, Toys, and Trains: to 1,200 sites:

David Nebenzahl spake thus:

Definitely no way to do this at home: the equipment's way too expensive.

The process is commonly referred to as "pad printing", which turns out to be a form of gravure printing, combined with an offset-printing-like process. Gravure uses a metal plate which has the image areas undercut from the surface. The plate is covered with ink, and a "doctor blade" wipes the ink from the high spots, leaving it in the recesses. These plates used to be made photochemically, but nowadays they're made with a laser.

In the olden days, gravure (specifically "rotogravure", since the presses were rotary) was used for printing newspapers, most famously the color Sunday comics; the gravure plate printed directly onto the paper. In pad printing, the inked and doctored gravure plate is pressed against a rubber plate; this plate is then used to print the object, allowing the rubber to conform to the surface of the object (think rivets and other cast-on details on a boxcar or locomotive). So like offset plates, pad-printing plates are "right-reading", not reversed.

That's all for today's printing lesson.