James’ Blog

Bah humbug

Posted on December 18th, 2006 by James.
Categories: Pinball.

Making these plastics is driving me insane! Ingore the last post, after a while the glue went cloudy

I’ve now got some awesome looking photoshoped decal pics, but sticking them to the plastic is proving to be a real problem.

I spent a good few hours going over the entire 600dpi surface of the scans that I had cleaning up all the tiny scratches and every last bit of dust. Then I redrew the red pin stripe lines to make them super sharp (wow that sounds really anal now I’m actually typing this!) and I added a little extra black around the edges, so that when I cut them out I won’t get a white halo around them. Then I went online and found an ICC colour profile for my printer, so that what I have on the screen, actually looks like what prints out.

The difference than an ICC profile makes is INSANE! Before I had crazy amounts of photoshop layers to tweak the colours to print just right. Now I’ve got none and I can actually print what I see! It’s fantastic!

BUT!.. I can’t stick the ****ing things down! The first time I stuck it down with regular super glue, the glue dried cloudy. Then I tried soft plastic glue and the first application worked perfectly.. but all subsequent tries have gone cloudy and one of them came up with lots of little grey areas, which looked really weird. A guy in the know has told me ”Polycarbonate gasses and so the glue will always end up misty in the end!” and said my best bet was something called “dychloromethane” ??! .. yeah I’m sure that’s really easy to find in the Tescos glue section!

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