hai,
There are systesm to make decals with a laserprinter and special decal paper.

Does anyone have experience with this?

If yes, does it really work and do these decals remain fine for a long time or do the colors start fading after a couple of years?

Hi there !

Testors makes a home decal system which includes the paper ( for ink jet ) and they also have a decal sealant which you spray over the decals once they have been printed . Their paper comes in clear or white . You can get decal paper for a laser print can't recall the name of it .

As for having the colours fade over time it will depend on what type of ink your printer uses .
But I don't think you will have to really worry about that to much .

Hi,
It's important that you use inkjet paper for inkjet printers, and laser paper for laser printers. Sprue Brothers, Scalehobbyist.com, and Flightdecs all sell the Bare Metal Foil/Experts' Choice brand of decal paper, which is excellent. An eBay seller named Carol's Creations of Utah sells a brand called Bel's for around four dollars a sheet, including shipping. You might find it at your LHS as well, though I doubt it will be any cheaper.
After you draw or import your images (I use Paint), print them onto the shiny side of the paper. The paper is pretreated to take the ink. After it dries, spray it with a gloss varnish (I use the Wal Mart variety; it's just three dollars. Are there Wal Marts in Europe?) Give it two or three good coats. After it dries, you can cut carefully around each decal, drop it in water and let it sit for around a aminute; it won't take long as long to completely moisten as decals usually do. Then you can slide it onto the model surface just as you would any other decal.
There is clear decal paper, and white paper. It can be hard to cut cleanly around the white paper, so I spray on a white background instead. To illustrate, I take a stencil and spray a white circle of the appropriate size, then print my roundel on clear paper (unfortunately, there's no white ink). Then, I just apply it over the white background.
Good luck with your project. If you have any more questions, or run into trouble, just come back and ask. One of us will be glad to help you.

thanks a lot for the replies

this hobby is really fantastic, there is always something new

I used Experts choice, White Laser. And found it very thick for 1/72(ended up sanding the edges of it!!!)

It took the colour very well though.

Before sanding

The cross is a tamiya decal not the thinnest itself.

After a couple of Future,sand,Future sessions


If you click on the photos you can see in nasty hi-res.

Never tried a clear one, hopefully they would be thinner.

Hi Drabslab

Here's the look at the Crafty Computer Paper system which took a while back. I actually threw out the test pieces when I left London last summer and I noticed that the inks still looked bright, even though they were a few years old (I think they were Canon or Epson).

All the best

Rowan

This looks really interesting! I'd like to add a question to this thread... Are there any websites that have marking sets pre-designed for printing on this kind of system?

Thansk for raising this

Merlin, TedMamere, do you remember the old proposal for setting up a Digital sources page on aeroscale?