This is what I have so far for the steam decals: Please critique away! Includes: Door and window trim in orange White boxes for 70s era steam. fits Athearn 2-8-0 and Bachmann 4-4-0 2 sizes of builder plates to fit dimples of either 4-4-0 or 2-8-0 Number plates specific to era for each locomotive. # 28 has 3 plates. Lots of numbers. Covers Cab#s, Rear Tender, Sand Domes(not prototypical for most locomotives), and front headlights. I dropped 1 & 2 from the large cab numbers for space, as I figured you can use 22 and 11 for that. #18 had small cab number in all photos i have seen of it. Small stars for driver axles Large star for front smoke box of #30 and #28 Lettering for modern Sierra Railway, Sierra Railroad, and old Sierra Railway White lines for walkways and side of the tender. Sets are 3.9" by 2.3" and can fit 8 sets per sheet. Skipgear or Johnb, please PM me an email adress for me to send the CDR files to when I'm finished. -Curn
These look great! Wtih the layout like that, and 8 per page, things should go well. When we get the file ready, I'll print them immediately.
Hi all, the decal look great, and the models you have already done are fantastic. I will measure the sharknoes tonight to get the size of the space required (sorry if this delays proceedings, I have not been near a computer all weekend); hopefully one of the names already on the sheet will work but if not putting a set in the margins would be perfect. MioneRR, thanks for the heads up on the Model Railroader article, if you find out which month and year it was I should be able to find it. Kind regards, James
Curn, well.....that didn't go over well. :-( It saw the grey as white and printed a background mask of white....the white areas came up as void (non-ink) areas. Hmmmmmmm...... This will take a little work. It's safe to say that the proof failed on that one. Ok.....no biggie. More setting work hopefully.
My bad. It was in Railroad Model Craftsman, May 2000. Have you considered the Atlas VO1000 for Sierra nos. 40, 42, 44? They are S12s but S12s and VO1000s are only slightly different, stacks and such. The 40, 42 and 44 were the first diesels the Sierra received in the 50s and operated until recently. I did a clinic at the N convention in Denver two years ago on modeling the Sierra in N. Also, have you joined the Historic Sierra Yahoo group? There's a lot of good information in the files and some old timers that recall a lot of the history. Several worked the on the Sierra. I visited John Zach's Sierra layout in Twain Harte that was built for operating sessions. 1200 sq. ft, double decked in HO. John has a ton of info. Like most Sierra modelers, he takes liberties with history. The Sierra had a couple of mines it served on the Angels branch in the 20s. Just say the Angels branch still operates. Ed Petry in the Minneapolis area does the same thing. His layout was in Model Railroading or the other mag published in Denver in '99, I think. His layout is bigger than John's. There was the article on the layout John Armstrong designed on the Sierra a couple years ago, too.
John, Yuck. You will need to turn off the page background color. Should be under Layout>Page Background. If you can't find it search under the help topics for background, or I will send you a file without the background color set. Sorry about that. I hope you didn't waste too much white. -Curn
Curn, I have measured the sharknose and the current lettering is 1/16" tall, the distance between the body panel joints is 7/16" but, as you know, the black strip runs down the whole side of the loco. Having a black patch with lettering over the top would be perfect, I am thinking that white would stand out better, plus the numbers will be white. I have a pair with me at work today with an N Scale rule incase you need any thing else. I also looked at my other steam locos and comparing the size of the decals for the 2-8-0 and the other sizes on the sheet you posted I think that we have covered all of them. Thanks, James
James, I'm going to make a decal that looks like this. But with white text? It will cover the B&O, but not the yellow stripes that run the length of model. How tall does it need to be to cover the road name but not the stripes? 1/16" tall font. What is the distance between the yellow stripes so that I don't cover them? How wide is the B&O from beginning of the B the end of the O?
Curn, Here are the dims you asked fro plus a few shots, if they are any use. Between the stripes it is 3/32" and form one end of B&O to the other its is 1"13/32. You've got me thinking about he color now, I am wondering if the yellow would be better agents the blue. I think I am going to stick with white, unless you are anybody else thinks I am making a big mistake? James
At the very least, white will show up better on the black patch. James, assuming you have a printer and the ability to view PDF files, Can you print this and make sure that it fits the model? http://sonnet1.sonnet.com/usr/curn/coll/patch.pdf Just make sure when the print dialog box pops up that under page handling you don't select any scaling or they wont be the right size.
Hope to generate a proof tomorrow morning. The layering should work. As a good thing, the opacity of the decals have been top shelf in the past. These should be an easy run that has excellent quality. I have high expectations.
Curn, Spot on. I printed and test fitted the layout as requested and they fit perfectly. The ARARILLO-USAf Stretched is the largest and therefore the clearest so if there is room for only one set on the sheet it should be this one, but if there as room, the others are great to as I haven’t totally made my mind up. Thanks again, James.
Well....here are some results on the proof. The gold is a little spotty and takes two passes. It doesn't look nearly as crisp as the white, but the printing is so small, it is difficult to read under a magnifying lense, so I guess the little sparkle/twinkle of gold will work. I would give it a grade of "B". A single pass of white is sufficient. Skipgear and I have worked with this in the past, and the opacity is fine with a single pass. I just mention this because some people have nievely said that white MUST have two layers. I tried it anyway, and it looked worse with 2 layers. There appears to be an adhesion problem with a second layer and it would have to be burnished anyway. Orange...SUCKS. Terrible. It was spotty and looked like a mangey dog. Not good. I may have to play with manually making an orange, but the current set-up is not going to work. I was only able to get 6 up on a page. There is no room horizontally on the 1-up to fit in the additional diesel decals, but we do have a little room on the bottom of the 1-up to put some stuff in and still get a good layout. If we need more room than that, then we'll just go with a 4-up per page. The decal paper isn't expensive (I buy it in bulk packs), so that's not an issue.
Well it was discussed from the start that orange might be a problem, so we'll just have to drop that layer. I'll have to lay off the coffee so I can paint the orange by hand As far as the gold goes, are you using the gold leaf or metallic gold ink? Metallic gold being much better than the gold leaf. Most of the data on those number and builder plates is so small that i didn't expect it to show up so its not a big deal. As long as the number on the number plate is readable?
metalic gold. the other is "Gold Foil". I have that too, but I also like the metalic gold better. Actually, you can see the numbering quite well. The lettering (which looks to be about 1" or 2" letters) doesn't show up that well....at least as far as I can tell under a magnifying glass. Tony and I are going to fiddle around with the density and see if we can get a better orange. Alps printers are very picky and take some tuning to get what you want. BTW, I own 3. A 1000, 1300, and a 5000. We're doing these on the 1300.
We have resolved the orange issue. This may take a week to implement however. It is a rather complicated hardware change, but certainly "do-able". Additionally, the metalic gold may have been resolved. more work needed. The clarity and definition of the decals is impressive. Many production problems were resolved this weekend. We should be able to do a run very soon.
Just thought I would post a little decal progress.....these are the CF&E decals we were working on to get the layering of colors right to maintain the level of detail seen in the early white caboose sheet. Learning to get the most out these printers seems to be an art in itself. A lot of the colors are trial and error. You don't want to see what the first CFE blue looked like. BTW John's decals include the CFE, Road number and number boards. The saftey stripes are Microscale. The white stripe is paint so you can compare the paint to the decal color. We are working hard on the orange because not only the Sierra decals need it but this does also....
I know somone already posted this link , so if so excuse me, if not glad I did then http://www.nscalesupply.com/pon/Decal.aspx The Decals they list there are from Microscale, so Microscale has an even larger selection if nscalesupply doesn't have the type your looking for. But keep in mind that Microscale has a $20 min order. So it comes out to 4 decal sheets. What I did was buy 4 different but in the same Livery Well that's my two bits hope it helps
LOL...."Smurf Happy Blue" would be the best description. Oh, I received the diesel artwork. I'll take a look at it this evening.
