Help! I need some decals made!

[jbwelda]

i thought i would start up an old hasagawa mazda cosmo race car that has been sitting on the shelf tempting me for some time now.

got it down and examined it, come to find out the decals have really not survived very well. the decal film, and therefore the decal graphics themselves, have crinkled up on the backing. the decals are actually three dimensional now and obviously are not going to improve when introduced to water.

so thats the bad news.

the good news is that the sheet is still more or less intact and none of the crinkled film has flaked off, so the sheet could theoretically be photographed or scanned and reproduced on decal paper. the colors are bright and vivid. however there may be some white decal area which i understand is a problem...i would be willing to work out something on those areas like using another color than white.

it would probably require some cleaning up of the image to get rid of the crinkled look but even reproducing them just as they are would be acceptable and better than nothing.

would anyone here care to volunteer for this project? i can pay a bit of money but it wont be a software engineers hourly salary or anything.

i would probably want 3 or 4 copies of the sheet (i think three would probably fit on one 8.5 X 11 inch sheet of paper) so i could have spares. the graphics are pretty extensive. i can take a photo and post it here to illustrate but i have not as yet done so.

please if anyone can help me out PM me or shoot me an email at jbwelda at gmail dot com

many thanks in advance!

[jbwelda]

well not exactly an overwhelming response!

[Harry P.]

Are you talking about someone taking your scan and re-creating or touching up the decals electronically? If so, I can do that.

[Raul_Perez]

Bill,

I would help but my computer at home died a tragic death earlier this week.

They said that it would be 4-6 weeks before it is repaired. If you're not in a hurry, I can help you when I get my PC back...

Later,

[jbwelda]

ah yes thanks for the replies!

i am not in a particular hurry though within the next year most likely.

and harry, i would leave that up to whoever wanted to help out. whatever way would be easiest and would still work. i think the decal sheet would survive being mailed in a reinforced envelope so i dont mind sending off the original.

heres a photo of the sheet i need done...i am sure if we needed better photos i can take them with a proper light setup, this one i just handheld and pointed the camera. you can see the crinkling i am speaking of accentuated by the shadow from the flash:

and heres a close up of the problem:

and the kit they are for...i have to assume this is a pretty obscure kit, but if anyone has one and the decals are good and wants to part with it, i would probably buy it for the decals alone:

by the way, an excellent example of how box art CAN be, ready for framing essentially!

whatever help i can get from this i sincerely appreciate a lot, and we can talk about some kind of payback plan if not just $ up front! i realize even more now looking at the photos that what would probably have to be done is a really good copy stand digital photo of the sheet, that could be imported into photoshop or similar, cleaned up (and thats where labor would start to really come in) and then printed out on some decal material (easy to say...not necessarily easy to do).

if that all turned out to be too much trouble, i would be open to compromises.

thanks again!

Edited December 16, 2009 by jbwelda

[charlzrocks]

Oh MY! I have never seen decals do that at all!

Kinda looks like stained glass.....I wish I could help, but my pc resources are very limited.

After you get the replacements made, you might want to try a topcoat on the originals just to see if it clears out the cracks and if they might still work.

I would love to know what caused that effect on the decals........

[Harry P.]

If you could send me a good clear scan I can recreate the whole sheet in Photoshop for you and email you a jpeg that you would then print out on decal paper. Or else you could send me the sheet and I could recreate it from the original.