Decals

I've just stated with a couple of scratch built rockets and I thought about adding some personalised decals. I've look round the boards and seen there are inkjet decal sheets available, but a quick google search pulled up nothing available to the UK - at least without £20 p&p.
Any suggestions where I can find them in the UK?

Gareth

Hi womblegs. I don't know about getting the water-transfer-type decal sheets in the UK, but I've been experimenting a bit with Avery labels which should be available at a larger office supply store.??? Anyway, its just a full 8.5x11 (or whatever the similar metric size is for you guys!) sheet uncut of nearly clear adhesive backed plastic. Pretty thin and, so far, I like them more than decals... just much easier to apply, cheaper and after a final clear coat of paint you really can't tell too much of a difference close up and not at all from any distance. To be complete, all I've done are some stripes and some test images (pics of my cat!) but they look good and this label material allows very fine lines. I'll have finished a couple Big Daddy's with my wife this week so I can post some pics of the results....

I've been looking for decal paper also. In the hobby shop two days ago, I saw plenty of 'We know this stuff works on lasers, but haven't the foggiest about ink jets'..

I've an ink jet printer!

Is the avery label pretty thin? Most label material I've seen seems to be very thick.

Is there any brand/type of decal paper out there that works with ink jet printers? (The biggest problem is that the ink is water soluable, which can be a bummer with water slide decals!)

Thanks!

If you guy's do a search of this forum, you'll find all the info you could want on making waterslide decals and were to get the paper.
Ink jet water slide decals is fairly new, I've had better results with the latest batch of papers from "Micro-Marks" some of the "on-line" decal paper sources Look cheaper, but they ship in poor packaging allowing a lot of sheet damage. Micro-Marks materal is shippped properly and I've had no damaged or even mared sheets. Laser papers work wonderfully on Alps printers, Ink jet papers must be clear coated. try Kylon workable fixatif, Works great no curling.

Thanks Trogdor. I'll have to look into that. Do you know the Avery code for the labels, just to make my search easier?

Gareth

I found the micro mark stuff, their home page is here:
https://www.micromark.com/

They have mostly railroad stuff, but they specifically have the ink jet decal paper, with a fixative, to keep it from running away when you get it wet.

Thanks for the pointer!

Here in the UK I have found a good supplier for water slide decals. They are JetCal and are very very good quality

You can get them from: https://www.m-techdirect.co.uk/ and the decal page is https://www.m-techdirect.co.uk/jetcal.htm

Cost is good too:

S1131 JetCal Slide Off Inkjet Decal Paper x5 £7.99
S113110 JetCal Slide Off Inkjet Decal Paper x10 £14.99
S1131B JetCal Slide Off Inkjet Decal Paper Bulk £104

I got mine next day - they went through my Espon Photo 925 on normal setting, used a little warm water to slide them off, dried with a hair dryer. The decal goes white when dry - I used Halfords clear laquer and they went from white to crystal clear! Very happy

I have attached a pic of the 1st decal I tried. Also I thik EPSON ink works better then the cheaper ink - purple was purple on an Epson cart and black on a Jettec cart.

Steve C.

hey pinter seems to have found a good source/cost although for the avery label sheets I got 25 for 12 bucks or so.... hmmm how many pounds is that?

Live mid-market rates as of 2003.10.06 16:48:31 GMT.
12.00 USD
United States Dollars = 7.18062 GBP
United Kingdom Pounds


the internet is so cool.... I'll check for the Avery code number when I get home and still post some pics of my attempts so we can all get a good feeling for cost vs. capabilities of these decal solutions...

Anyone else wanna post some good closeups of homemade decals?

Steve, thanks for the info. Serious Q, is it really any good? My area is computing, or at least was until I was made redundant! M-Tech (jetcal is their own brand) stuff is the worst, we refused to stock it. I realise that this is basically paper, but....

I have looked through a lot of your posts, some great looking rockets. I do have a few questions for you if you don't mind giving away trade secrets Let me know.


Gareth

JetCal is the worst? I have had 0 problems with it - infact I rate it better than some big manufacturers decals.

To be honest I was massivley impressed with this stuff, As you see from the pic I attached it looks sweet ;-) The only problem I have had is non genuine Epson ink can give strange results.

The other goodie with this stuff is that it is the only stuff i have found in the UK for a decent price.

Steve C.

Glad to see someone else is up at 1.30 in the morning.

I guess at the end of the day paper is paper. I noticed you said you were also using Jetcal carts in your printer. To give you an example of some of the problems we ran accross. Firstly on thier first carts you also had to purchase a chip programmer seperatly. They quickly changed to a chip on the each cart. The colour matching was poor to say the least. The most extreme problem was we had to replace a customers 6 month old printer because the cart popped! Epson refused to replace because they were not using original Epson carts. After all of this we stopped stocking thier products.

Anyway, many thanks for the info - I guess I will bite the bullet and order some tomorrow.

Gareth

ok, the Avery full page uncut sheets (8.5x11inch) are:

Avery Clear Full Sheet Labels Ink Jet - 8665

I also got:

Avery White Full Sheet Labels Ink Jet - 8165

The white sheets are to try laminating balsa fins with as the paper/wood glue and paper/spray adhesive laminating have had mixed results for me... these attempts were definitely better than just balsa or balsa with ca painted on it but more of a pain than I'd like... maybe I'll also try this label paper with decal remakes that have white in them and then just clear coat, carefully cut out, stick on and then clear coat the model to seal it on.

oh and the White sheets also come in a "low-stickiness" variety (or whatever, I'm not in the paper or adhesive business!) meant to be removed and reused, you probably don't want that...

The clear sheets definitely need to be handled carefully as I pulled up ink and got fingerprints all over on my first try and the ink dried at least an hour... so a clear coat is a necessity at some point before you really handle the final product ( I got away with careful handling of the edges and a final clear coat once on the model in my initial tests...)

While these clear labels aren't as thin or really as clear (there's a little bit of haze like maybe a microscopic fuzziness for ink to stick to) as a water transfer decal, I think most people would be happier with the ease of use, cost and availability.

While water transfers are kinda like the thickness of a contact lens (you know really floppy and fold on themselves easily, but they're wet...)the labels are more like the plastic on CDs that takes a knife or a lot of patience to get off but not really THICK. Not sure you can really tell easily without looking closely but really who cares at that point, unless you're doing scale or something most people will only see it from 30 ft away or while its flying 100-500 mph anyway! Maybe that's too extreme a comparison but so far it looks good to me.

Also, maddog you had mentioned the ink vs. laser thing... the laser products are meant to survive the heat of the laser fusing the toner powder to the page while the inkjet papers are meant to absorb very fine droplets of liquid ink without smearing.... pretty different requirements and mixing may cause a big mess in your printer! (dunno which would be worse, melting or smearing!?)

Ohhh ya, my wife helped me finish a recent Estes kit last weekend, the Screaming Mimi, which had adhesive labels rather than water transfer and I'm fairly sure from what I recall that the Avery clear labels were thinner than the Estes stickers.... and again they also allow very fine lines.... since surface is more like a photo paper than copy paper maybe...