[Jacques Reed]

Three months ago I started repainting my truck in a more accurate KG-J before winter set in. I had repainted the dash board and when I reinstalled the switch plates in it they looked a bit shabby by comparison. Even though they are still in a reasonable condition I thought it might be a good time to reproduce the graphics on a decal and put them on a spare set of plates I have. It would be a good wintertime project.

I had made decals before using Microsoft Paint so thought I could knock them out in a couple of days. After scanning my set of originals, and another light switch plate to get a couple of missing words, I set to work.
After completing the graphics I realized MS Paint had a few shortcomings and in the course of trying to correct them came upon paint.net. It is basically a freeware graphics editor developed from MS Paint but with a lot more capabilities. Rather than persevere with MS Paint I decided to start over again this time using the switch plate scans in the paint.net program. I am a big fan of it now and it wasn’t too hard to get a reasonable grasp of it having some experience with Paint. A couple more days work and then the decal graphics were done- again.

I test printed the graphics on my son’s monochrome laser printer instead of my inkjet printer as it needs to be printed in black only, and inkjet printer decals need a clear acrylic coating to prevent the ink from running when soaking the decal in water. This requirement is eliminated with a laser printed decal. Was quite impressed with the results even on plain A4 paper. He has been encouraging me to get a laser printer for a while, especially from the operating costs side. Suitably impressed, I went out and bought a new Brother monochrome laser printer for about the price of 6 new inkjet cartridges a few days later.

I obtained the A4 laser decal paper and was ready to print them. But first, a few more tests using plain A4 on my new printer. Here’s where I started pulling my hair out! When I put more than one image on a page the images shrank about 4%. I tried scaling the image but then the closest registration I could obtain between the switch holes was out by 1mm.

If I printed individual images on each A4 sheet the plates were printed full size with perfect registration, but it would be a waste of decal paper. I also noticed a fuzzy sawtooth edge on all the graphics and lettering on the laser printer images when viewed through a magnifying glass but not when it was printed it on my inkjet printer. What’s going on? A few more hours on the internet learning everything I could about decals, printers, file types, plug-ins, etc. Anyway, I could extend this post by a lot more but will save the reader a lot of computer geek-speak anguish.

Suffice to say, as a last resort, I contacted the Brother Help Centre last week and they informed me that I had to make one obscure change to the printer settings that I never saw in the manual, or if I did, I didn’t understand what it was. Bingo! Multiple clear, sharp, full size, perfect registration decals on one A4 sheet. I am always loathe to blame the equipment before exhausting every avenue but in this case I could have saved myself a lot of time if I had contacted them first. Still, I learnt a lot of other interesting stuff along the way so nothing was lost.

The spare switch plates were cleaned of all old paint and rust, then primed, spray puttied, and wet sanded, then primed again to provide a very smooth surface for the decals. Most off-the-shelf grey paints were too dark so I looked at hobby paints. Surprisingly, after comparing many colours, Testor’s Model Master, Canada Voodoo Grey, was the closest match- how appropriate for a CMP! Being a gloss paint it is also the best type surface for applying decals so that was another plus. A couple coats of that paint with an airbrush, then the decals, and a coat of clear satin acrylic to protect the decals completed the project. The decaled plates are to the left of the plates I scanned to produce the decals in the first photo and the plates I used for decaling are the ones in the right photo.

In all, a satisfying way to pass some time when the weather was not shed friendly.

Hope this is of interest to fellow MLU members.

Cheers