Making Dials

[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!