Does anyone have any tips on places I can either buy repro decals or have some made up?
I want some new decals for the Skidstar so either original NOS decals or repro will do the job.
velographics do repro decals for heaps of bikes.
Not sure if there’s a website, but check out bikeforums.net in the cranky&vintage forum, look for a user ‘mswatnak’
Thanks Blakey. I’ve sent Mike an email so we’ll see how it goes.
For anyone else who’s interested, here’s the Velographics website.
The site says that decals are mostly USD30 plus postage.
Sorry to bring up a long dead topic but I was wondering if Velographics worked out for you and your skidstar?
It would’ve but I didn’t bother in the end. He could do a set of decals for about USD40 but I decided against repainting the frame so I never got around to organising decals.
He can do pretty much any decals if you give him good originals or photos to work from.
if you give him good originals or photos to work from.
My decals aren’t a good point to reproduce from. I did get some nice pics from angrydwarf which I handed off to my, makes an insane income graphic designer older sister, but she had a hard time creating a good vector mask to get at Malvern’s proprietary font with adobe illustrator, and consequently gave up. I then talked to some guy at www.collectablecycles.com who said he would stencil the graphics with enamel on decal paper, seems the way to go because he has the scale in size down pat, but I want to use an automotive laquer that would lift the paint on the decal and I don’t want to rattle can enamel the decals, and I’m still waiting to hear from him. I may beg my sister to try again, given I might not hear from the collectable cycles guy, but going that route I’ll have to do a run of at least 5-10 print runs and sell off the rest to recoup some of the expense. Then again velographics might be good if he has the skidstar gt on file, that way he knows the scale of the decals. I’m kinda at a loss, but I’m willing to pay a little more than neccesary to get it done right. BTW extracting the seatpost consumed at least a day of my life and was a saga in itself. Anyone need a mandrel that was turned by a machinist to fit exactly to the skidstar seat tube?
I think the hardest thing about tracing graphics from tubes is the foreshortening that occurrs in the photographs. I plan on making some kenevans ones which I would get cut in adhesive vinyl. Would you be able to clearcoat over the fraction mm of vinyl? Don’t know but might be worth a shot.
I have a Kenevans I can measure the decals on if you want the dimensions.
Yeah I think I know that fella.
Thanks, I’ll see how i go with the pics first. Finding it hard to make time.
Cheers anyway.
Have a look Here as i think i saw some Skidstar decals.
Yeah, that was covered in my second post on this topic.
A guy named Frank seems to run it, he was going to stencil me some decals, then I never heard from him. I’ve got some decals on the way from Dan the sticker man, in Lidcombe, http://www.decals4motorcycles.com.au/index.htm
He’s got them on file, and probably a much better product than stenciled on graphics. His site states: “All decals are full color printed (no layers of vinyl). Current “State of the Art” Computer Technology. All made from genuine OEM decals.”
Maybe dye sublimation?
Will let you know how they look.
Was about to make a post about this topic then saw this.
We have just got a sheet of decals (one colour) made up for a Grand Prix helmet we have been designing. A local company made up a sheet and can do silver and gold which look pretty rad. i think his name is Krals creations. he made us up some good quality decals on clear vinyl.
might be an option for fixed stickers?..
Look, I am an amateur and I have taught myself to do decals for the Raleigh bicycles that I am restoring. Time to do each decal is 4-10 hrs per decal. Most graphics shops won’t bother to do a very accurate job, or would charge $35/hr, so you really want to do the work yourself. I also worked with michael swantak and helped him to correct 2x of his raleigh decals to improve the accuracy. I got some decals from him.
Two tricks are important.
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Cut out some graph paper and tape it down around the outside of the decal you want to photograph. set your digital camera on maximum zoom and take several shots from far away to minimize parallax error. Import into an engineering draw program like illustrator, autocad, or ms-visio. Use the graph-paper spacing to scale the photos to correct size. For large graphics, crop each photo into a small strip (maybe 1/4" wide strip) and composite several (2-3) straight-on photos together to remove cylindrical distortion. For this you really need the CAD capabilities of these programs (draw a line perpendicular to your seat-tube and ask the CAD program to read out the length of the line. This length ~ in drawing inches ~ needs to be scaled up to 1 1/8th inches which is the outside diameter of nearly all seat-tubes - in fact, the whole photo needs to be scaled up by this factor ~ use a pocket calculator to figure out how much …)
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When you are done tracing the graphics, select all of your graphics objects and set transparency to 80% roughly, then print on overhead slide projector file (8.5 x 11 film, 10 sheets for $5). tape it down onto the bike, OVER your original graphics, to check registration. Mark up the mistakes and go back to your computer and correct the graphics. With some practice you can print several times onto 1 piece of transparency in different places on the slide, so as not to waste slide paper.
The third skill you will need is you need to trace everything with spline outlines, and you will need to know how to do the intersection (sum, difference) operations with splines so you can trace letters with see-through interiors such as “g” or “e” or “o”. Once you have mastered spline editing and intersection, you are ready to rock !!
Anyone can trace decals using these two techniques, and get close to perfect. With about half of my decals i was able to start with NOS decals scanned via an HP officejet scanner. The only thing to be careful about is this. some rasterizers used by some decal printers calculate line thicknesses and do the mathematics slightly differently than others (see my 531 decals below with overly thick letters to see the problem). so make sure to get proofs from your decal printer before going into final production.
good luck,
- Don Gillies in San diego, CA
P.S. here are some of my own decals :
Nice work Don. If I may ask, where’d you get those decals printed?
Thanks Don.
Looks like you registered here just to make that post - thanks for taking the time.
hmm, anyone know where valographicdecals went? I need some for a Rauler frame!
Cyclomondo has some in his ebay store…
Thanks bloke,
He didn’t have any for the [g]Rauler, though I emailed him and he found some then put em up, and today they magically appeared in my letter mcBox! Impressed with the service.
When the frame finishes getting re-coated I’ll put em on and get some photos up before it gets all scratched up again.
Peace
Corz
Done!
