Stenciling question

I'm wondering if folks have done custom stenciling on their creations and how you achieved that.

I'm working on my first HPR, and I'd like to get my 7-year old daughter a bit more excited about the hobby/craft. She's Japanese-American, so she has a Japanese name (実利愛), which I would like to get on the AF of the Madcow Hawk I am building.

Any ideas? My thought is to print out her name and use a knife to make a stencil, but I wonder how to apply that to the AF. But I feel that might cause some bleeding with spray paint or an airbrush (which I am NOT good at using).

Looking for suggestions - and cheap ones! ^_^

Paint, cure, add stencil, hit the edges with the original color, THEN with the stencil color inside the recoat window.

If you know someone with a Cricut or other vinyl cutter the prs run is a lot simpler.

dhbarr, Honestly, I need more basic info to understand your advice. I can do the print of her name easy enough, am worried about being "exact" with the cutting out of that (is there tech that can do it for me -to get it "proper"?), and the worried about paint bleed, probably not a technical term. ;-)

Not only am I new to HPR, but stenciling is most certainly a new thing to me!

If stenciling doesn't work you could try decals. I laser print my own decals. I use Microsoft Paint to create the artwork and it does an OK job.

Check out local libraries for a Cricut (my little library has one) or laser printers if you don't have one or access to one. You can get decal paper at many places. I get mine at eRockets.

Decal or printer much easier than stencils

Are you looking for characters light on a dark background, or characters dark on light background?

First is tougher.

Light characters on dark background

Pick your background rocket paint color
Paint the rocket
Try to match it on a color printer.
Color printer used to print your characters in white (or other light color) on the matched color background. (Or in reality, the printer colors everything BUT the characters the background color
Stick on the decal

Second is easier.

Dark characters on light background.

Pick your background rocket paint.
Paint the rocket the light background color.
Paint the DECAL paper the light background color. Solid.
NOW using the painted paper, run it through the printer to print the dark characters on the already painted paper.
Now put the decal on the rocket.
Perfect match.

For paint, vinyl masks/stencils are awesome. It's like a decal but the negative of it to mask the surface.

Usually though, just plain vinyl decals are way easier. Try stickershock23.com - Mark can make anything and the quality can't be beat.

I'm very tempted to look into stickershock23. Heck, looking can't hurt! Part of me would like to try and do it without going a decal route, but part of me wants it to look nice!

Thanks for all the input!

Stephen Henderson said:

I'm wondering if folks have done custom stenciling on their creations and how you achieved that.

I'm working on my first HPR, and I'd like to get my 7-year old daughter a bit more excited about the hobby/craft. She's Japanese-American, so she has a Japanese name (実利愛), which I would like to get on the AF of the Madcow Hawk I am building.

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This one?

2.6" Army Hawk MIM-23B

The easiest solution is to print a skin. I did this one for a BT70-based Scrambler upscale.



For a BT80 (2.6 inch) rocket - the skin would be about 8.17" wide (allowing for the thickness of the paper). Unless you have a large format printer, you will probably have to print more than one skin to cover the entire length of the rocket.

I sand the back side edges of the paper where they will meet as a seam so that they will lay flat (flatter). I use Super 77 spray adhesive to adhere the skin to the body tube, I seal the seams with medium thick CA, and then sand them flat (both in the sense of not standing proud of the airframe, and in the sense of not being shiny with hardened CA).

Mark the body tube with a straight line, the same way you'd mark it for fins or launch lugs. Line up one edge of the skin with the line and carefully roll it onto the tube.

The seams will be visible but, depending upon how well you line things up, not noticeable from any distance.

You can use the design to hide the seams too. Putting the seams in dark colored parts of the design will make them less noticeable.

And, if you've got paints in the color of the printed color, you can fill and paint the seams the same way you'd fill body tube spirals (thinned Elmer's Carpenters' Wood Filler).

It is, of course, easier to match the printed colors to the paints than to find paints to match the colors produced by your printer. There are couple of resources for finding RGB or Hex values for paints

https://encycolorpedia.com/a93d43

https://www.easyrgb.com/en/match.php

https://www.art-paints.com/Paints/Acrylic/Testors/Model/Yellow/Yellow.html

and more than this (just what I had in my recent broswer history).

I've also had pretty good success just grabbing the paint swatch (usually a JPEG) from the paint manufacturer's site, or from a retailers's site (like Home Depot) and using Photoshop to get the RGB values.

Good luck.

Printing your own decals works great if your pattern is to be dark against light paint.

For the reverse, getting access to a Cricut and cutting your own vinyl letters is ideal. They'll look perfect. That is functionally equivalent to having Mark @ Stickershock23 cut you some vinyl, but cheaper because you do it yourself. I found a co-worker who has a Cricut and is willing to bring it in for me once in a while to cut some rocket decals.

Stephen Henderson said:

dhbarr, Honestly, I need more basic info to understand your advice.

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All the advice about decals is probably a better way to go than stenciling, but it bugs me that no one has answered this request (post #3) for more information about dhbar's initial response (post #2). If you really want to do it by stenciling, read on.

dhbarr said:

Paint, cure

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I.e. apply the base color and give it plenty of time to cure thoroughly. This will take a couple of days and sometimes more.

add stencil

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Fix the stencil in position, probably best done with masking tape. Mask the rest of the rocket.

hit the edges with the original color

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Paint the edges of the letters with a coat of the base color. If any of it bleeds under the stencil it won't matter, and it seals the edges so the lettering color can't bleed under. Let that coat cure. It may not be necessary to wait more than a day; I'm sure that others can weigh in here. Also, some people prefer to do this step with clearcoat rather than the base color. the same edge sealing technique is used for masking to apply color patterns; after all, stenciling is just fancy masking.

THEN with the stencil color inside the recoat window.

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I.e., spray on the lettering. Let this cure for a day or two, but it sometimes helps not to wait for a complete cure as the paint can become brittle and chip when the stencil is removed.

If you know someone with a Cricut or other vinyl cutter the prs run is a lot simpler.

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Circuit, I'm sure you've gathered, is a brand of vinyl cutter, that would let you cut the stencil from thin vinyl sheet instead of heavy paper and with machine precision instead of by hand. I don't know what "the prs run" is. Some public maker spaces, such as are sometimes found in public libraries, have these machines. Also, some have laser cutters that would let you cut a stencil from heavy paper with such precision. Also also, I understand that Sticker Shock does vinyl cutting as well as decal printing, so you could get a vinyl stencil from them.

I honestly don't know how to get a hand-cut paper stencil to work. Seems like it would be impossible to seal it down; you're gonna get bleeding all over the place. Has anyone done this successfully?

Best approach if you can manage it is cut vinyl stencil, although once you have the ability to cut a stencil you could just as easily cut the vinyl letters and apply them (there is no step three). You may be able to find a Cricut if you ask around. They sell them at places like Michaels, plenty of crafters and scrapbookers have them, along with some libraries and maker spaces (if you have access to one). And they're not hard to learn how to use.

Why would hand cutting make sealing hard? You print the pattern then follow the lines with a good sharp knife on a cutting mat; why is that different from getting a CNC laser to cut it for you? Sealing-wise, that is.

I'd suggest a leathercraft swivel knife.

I mean sealing as in affixing the stencil to the rocket, and having all the edges sealed down. Vinyl mask are self-adhesive.

You could, of course, get some vinyl mask and hand-cut it, which would do the trick. I have no idea how hard that would be.

OK, but hand cut heavy paper shouldn't be any harder than machine cut heavy paper. And people have been using paper stencils for lots of things for many decades. Pull the stencil tight over the curve of the body tube and tape the outer edges (the outer edges of the stencil, not the letter edges) and you shouldn't have a problem.

jqavins said:

OK, but hand cut heavy paper shouldn't be any harder than machine cut heavy paper. And people have been using paper stencils for lots of things for many decades. Pull the stencil tight over the curve of the body tube and tape the outer edges (the outer edges of the stencil, not the letter edges) and you shouldn't have a problem.

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I wasn't making any distinction between hand-cut and machine cut paper, just between non-adhesive paper and adhesive masking material. Given that paint often finds its way even under masking tape, I wouldn't particularly trust non-adhesive mask to produce reliably sharp lines.

Also, with regular paper mask you can't have floating islands, whereas with vinyl mask you can literally do anything.

I’ve made sticky vinyl stencil / masks several times over the years. Here are a few examples.

The Praetor graphic I got electronically straight from Jim Flis. I fixed it up on the computer...probably with autocad...printed it out. Taped the print out on to some scrap vinyl I got from the local sign store and cut it by hand with an exact knife. I used low tack shelving paper from Walmart as the carrier sheet. This keeps it all together after you weed out the parts you don’t want. Carefully place on the rocket and paint.

The Praetor took several coats and lots of planning since it’s kinda complex. The mighty mick was pretty simple...all hand cut, even the clover.

Both of those are 15+ years old. Just did this BD logo with my wife’s cricut...it’s all paint. I painted it with a Testors red paint stick. Got some bleed thru...had to do some fixin’, but from a few feet away it looks good.

All rattle can paint...nothing fancy. You don’t have to worry about the vinyl color matching since it’s all paint.

OKTurbo got to give you some pics of course....



This is cut vinyl under a clear coat....the new vinyl is very this and just blends in under a clear coat. This was in my SBR Horizon kit.