Making Dials

[Yorkie]

I picked up a Portadyne Princess at the Golborne Swapmeet recently, and while I'd got it in bits, I thought that a dial scan might one day be useful. [Now in appropriate section - Joe] The original is nicely screen printed on the reverse side of 1mm acetate, but it would be very easy to replicate on card behind thin clear acetate. What a pity that all dials aren't of this quality! (It's 8.5cms wide x 10 cms high).

Nice, innit?

[Radio Fixer]

Yes! but better still decal it onto acrylic sheet from Mark Oppat.

Gary

[Yorkie]

Yes! but better still decal it onto acrylic sheet from Mark Oppat.

Gary

Thanks for reading Gary.

I guess if it was printed onto white rather than clear ink-jet decal paper it would work too, and could be applied to a piece of stiff card or thin metal. The dial is fixed with four little metal tabs on an aluminium plate and viewed behind a celluloid 'window' so the dial doesn't need any acetate over it as such - it just needs to look right.

http://www.craftycomputerpaper.co.uk/.-I...er_151.htm

I see that Crafty Computer Paper now have what they call 'Lazertran' paper for use in ink-jets, which doesn't need any protective spray to make it waterproof:

http://www.craftycomputerpaper.co.uk/.In...PJ317I.htm

Not cheap!

I bought five sheets of ink-jet decal paper from them some time ago but have yet to use it. I just know there will be tears before bedtime if and when I do. As with PCBs, I think it's quite a learning curve with a lot of fairly expensive paper consigned to the bin, but you'd know that better than anyone Gary, having trodden that path to get to the point that you've arrived at, with the stunning results you've achieved!!

When using ink-jet acetates for PCBs, often the artwork only covers a small aread of the sheet, so the rest of the sheet is wasted. I saw a tip on the EPE Chatzone, in which one guy first prints his design on normal paper to ascertain the position on the sheet, then cuts a piece of ink-jet acetate the size required for the design, tapes it over the paper in the right place then runs the paper through again to print onto the acetate. That way, he gets several PCB layouts from one page with minimal waste. Neat eh?

I guess the same technique could be used for decal paper and radio dials to save using a whole sheet on one small dial.

Sorry to drift off-topic a bit - I know this section is about dial scans rather than technniques, but hopefully it's relevant enough, and we don't get too picky on this forum about what is on/off topic.

[Retired]

Hi,

Thanks for adding this interesting thread David. Yes the dial is neat.

As you rightly say when it comes to printing Gary has gone into this in great detail with stunning results.

A few years ago I tried various methods of printing vintage radio logos but then ran out of time due to more pressing jobs. One thing I tried was to ask our local printing company to print an A4 sheet of white inkjet water-slide decal paper completely with gold ink. I then ran this sheet through my inkjet printer to add the non metallic colours only to fail miserably as the ink sat on the surface as thousands of tiny droplets and didn't want to dry. Had the idea worked this printing company would have only charged me £25 for each colour set up and I had to supply the decal paper. With a Bush radio logo only having three colours it would be possible to print lots of A4 sheets off for £75 but it would not be financially viable because the demand would not be there to justify the cost

I too bought from Crafty Computer Paper which is a good company to deal with but rather expensive when it comes down to experimenting.

The old ALPS Printers are the way to go but these tend to be expensive although the inks are still available; it is the metallic colours which cause the problem such as gold colour as standard printers cannot print these colours. I watched a video of an Alps printer at work and these printers print one colour only at a time but for multiple colours the paper is printed as normal then drawn back into the printer each time adding another colour; it looked rather crude in action but worked extremely well. I did enquire at our local "Staples" at the time and found out they can print white which is yet another colour standard printers cannot print.

I had considered using an old printer cartridge and filling it with gold coloured ink just to see what would happen but never got around to trying it.

Off-topic is wonderful because it gives a great deal more information and includes many useful tips which if strictly adhering to topic would be lost.

I'd like to hear other members expand on the subject of printing; Gary's radio logo's are just brilliant but screen printing was involved if my memory serves me correctly. I also looked into doing screen printing at home and there are a number of interesting videos on "You-tube", it's possible more videos have been added since I played around with the project. One thing is certain; it is a fascinating subject once you start looking into it and it opens up a whole new way of life.

Kind regards, Col.

[Yorkie]

Hi,

Thanks for adding this interesting thread David. Yes the dial is neat.

As you rightly say when it comes to printing Gary has gone into this in great detail with stunning results.

I had considered using an old printer cartridge and filling it with gold coloured ink just to see what would happen but never got around to trying it.

Off-topic is wonderful because it gives a great deal more information and includes many useful tips which if strictly adhering to topic would be lost.

Thanks for your comments Colin.

Joe's kindly moved the thread to here from the dial scan section so we can continue the discussion. I'm not sure that gold ink as compared to the normal ink for that particular printer and printhead would work in a normal ink-jet cartridge, but who can say till it's been tried? The more I've looked into ink-jet technology, the more remarkable it seems to be. For example, I hadn't appreciated that at the printhead, the ink is superheated and squirted onto the paper as droplets of steam. There's a video that explains how they work here, which unfortunately is prefixed with an annoying advert, but well worth watching:

http://science.discovery.com/videos/deco...-work.html

Canon claims to have invented what it calls 'bubble jet' technology in 1977, when (allegedly) a researcher accidentally touched an ink-filled syringe with a hot soldering iron and the heat forced a drop of ink out of the needle, and so began the development of a new printing method. The operation of an inkjet printer is easy to visualize: liquid ink in various colours in just the right combination and density being squirted onto paper to build an image. A print head scans the page in horizontal strips, using the printer's motor assembly to move it from left to right and back again, while the paper is rolled up in vertical steps, again by the printer. A strip (or row) of the image is printed, then the paper moves on, ready for the next strip. To speed things up, the print head doesn’t print just a single row of pixels in each pass, but a vertical row of pixels at a time.

For most inkjet printers, the print head takes about half a second to print the strip across a page. On a typical 8 1/2"-wide page, a print head operating at 300 dpi deposits at least 2,475 dots across the page. This translates into an average response time of about 1/5000th of a second. Quite a technological feat and a miracle of precision with so many things happeneing in concert at every instant! There are several types of inkjet printing, the most common of which is "drop on demand" (DOD), which means squirting small droplets of ink onto paper through the tiny nozzle of the print head; like turning a water hose on and off 5,000 times a second. The amount of ink propelled onto the page is determined by the print driver software that dictates which nozzles shoot droplets, and when to shoot them.

You might recall Colin, that when you and I visited Mike Phelan a few months ago he’d made an excellent water slide transfer for a transistor portable which he’d applied to the rear of a clear acetate dial. I can’t remember the model, but the colour Mike had chosen was just the right shade of yellow to fool the eye into believing that it was gold - very effective indeed. We’ve seen the results obtained by Gary and Robert Darwent, and there may well be others beavering away unnoticed. Dials are such an important feature of old radios, and perhaps the hardest problem to overcome. (In order of importance after the cabinet itself, I'd rank dials #1, speaker fret #2, knobs #3, backs #4).

I’ve got an Ekco A77 set which isn’t really worth the effort due to a dial with missing legends due to lettering flaking off, and others that I’ve mentioned before, dials on Marconi sets seem especially prone to flaking. I’ve attached some pics which illustrate the point. Without a decent dial scan, even for someone competent to clean up a scan to make a waterslide transfer, or create one from new, an image of what the dial should look like is needed. Nice though these little sets are, they probably don’t merit the time and effort called for in trying to create a new dial, even if one had the competence to do so, which - to my chagrin - I don’t! I can furtle around in Photoshop using the clone stamp tool, eraser etc to clean up scans, but that's about my limit. I am not worthy!

[Radio Fixer]

They say the decal paper has a use by date of 1 year, so you had better get printing David. 'Cos of this I only buy two sheets at a time.

As you say I have done a fair amount of dial making but not used the laminated method as Robert has done. I have another dial making article coming out in the Summer edition of the Bulletin which goes into the use of the Student Edition of CorelDraw... it may inspire you David to have a go. Its a most enjoyable package to use but be warned you need a powerful PC really, the minimum specs they quote would make it very frustrating I believe. Wont post details of it here as to me it spoils it for BVWS members... dont mind doing so afterwards though.

Thanks for the info on the ink jet technique... I will watch the vid when I get a mo! Wonderful that they can make it work with such accuracy and superb results... I'm a little in awe of silk screen as well, seems crude and was invented about a 1000 years ago in China.

Yes! I have done the stick it on a sheet of ordinary paper, after printing where it is first, but only for the backs of brown envelopes. These produce aged looking labels.

Decal material is a bit thick for this but I find 1/2 and even 1/3 sheets go through my printer OK . So I position so that the image will come out on the bottom and then cut that off for spraying. The rest gets used another time.

Mark Oppats web site is http://www.oldradioparts.net/index.html and he is a great guy and done a lot for the hobby. His tan acrylic sheet is ideal for some dials, your one above for example. You can get the stuff over here but it was full of flaws with light through it... his is perfect.

Here's a couple of dials I did on it using his sheet:

[Radio Fixer]

Hi Colin

The logo's were done on an Alps... I used to have a contact in the US who would print me a letter size sheet for not many $s. It was strictly on the understanding that I was not to start selling them for profit which I never did.

My only experience with silk screening was with the HMV 650 dial that I recounted in a previous thread. It would be nice to do some more but unless its for a common radio, where a good number can be made and sold, its really uneconomic.

That Crafty Lazertran paper, for ink jets, is cheaper than the Laser stuff but you still have to faff around with varnish to make it clear... polyurethane was quoted. So hows that spray? To me I would prefer to pay the extra coppers and buy the Laser and get Staples to print it for me... thats current thinking anyway

Gary

[Yorkie]

They say the decal paper has a use by date of 1 year, so you had better get printing David. 'Cos of this I only buy two sheets at a time.

As you say I have done a fair amount of dial making but not used the laminated method as Robert has done. I have another dial making article coming out in the Summer edition of the Bulletin which goes into the use of the Student Edition of CorelDraw... it may inspire you David to have a go. Its a most enjoyable package to use but be warned you need a powerful PC really, the minimum specs they quote would make it very frustrating I believe. Wont post details of it here as to me it spoils it for BVWS members... dont mind doing so afterwards though.

I'll look forward very much to reading the article Gary, and learning more about the Student Edition of Coreldraw. As to the PC spec, my PC has an intel core-due CPU at 3.06gHz, 4 gB ram, running a 32 bit OS, a 300gB hard drive, and W7 Home Premium. I don't know if that would be up to the task, nor more importantly, whether I would? I'm so far down the food chain that I think the ideal software that I'd need to get me off the ground would be 'dials for dummies' or some such thing!

[Radio Fixer]

The PC sounds up to the task David. You have to have the desire to get to learn the software and it isnt easy. Easier for me perhaps as I have years of using similar programmes and although there are no real standards many seem to have some commonality in the user interface. It is finding your way around that takes time but CorelDraw has some great guys out there who have posted tutorial videos. I have learnt a lot from those.

But it takes time... quite a lot of it... and buy a good "How to Book" as well... and then practice and more practice later else you go back down a snake if you leave it too long.

Hope you enjoy the article Gary