Sunday, December 4, 2016

Latest Habbiinsings

I mentioned in an earlier episode on these Habbiins wagons that a silly Transwaggon decal might be added to the side of one at some stage. 

I've owned an ALPS decal printer for about 20 years that I have a love-hate relationship with.  It's expensive to run, temperamental (making it even more expensive to run) and only runs on Windows XP. I do have an XP computer lying around but don't really feel like finding it, unpacking it, plugging it in and seeing if it still talks to the ALPS at the moment. 

And while the ALPS is great for lettering and printing out the simple 'vector' images that I've drawn up using CorelDraw, Adobe Illustrator, and similar programs, it really struggles with 'raster' bitmapped images from the likes of Photoshop, or images that you might borrow from the interweb. Mainly because its ancient drivers struggle to mix colours and produce an output that isn't all dotty and lo-res like a video game from the 1980s.

The solution is to use a laser printer for these raster images because they'll readily print at 300 or 600 dpi - plenty of resolution for a model. I don't happen to own one, but my local library and local print shop do. While I did find a colour .svg vector image for this logo online, spending 20 cents on a copy is better than an afternoon swearing at the ALPS, so off I went armed with my images in a word processing document, a sheet of plain clear decal paper (purchased from MicroMark in the US about 5 years ago) and a ruler. 

After a bit of iterative fiddling to get sizes correct, PDF-ing, transporting via a USB stick and so on, out it came. And on it went. I measured 23mm, and it printed out at 23mm, but it should be a tad bigger. I suppose I didn't take the ribs into account. And it should be a bit lower down the wagon side. But hey, close enough and proof that ye olde decal paper hasn't crumbled into dust.


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