Dry Transfers?

[Mike_AA9ZY]

I have a bunch of Bachmann unlettered On30 rolling stock and I need to put my free-lanced roadname on them.

Bachmann did not put data info on these unmarked cars, so I was wondering what the rest of you do: don't worry about it or what?

[Royce Wilson]

Try Clover House dry transfers. He has everything you need .


http://cloverhouse.com

Royce

[Royce Wilson]

I meant to add in the last message that these are quite nice dry transfers and that the gentleman that owns the bussiness is getting up in age. these transfers have been around for a good while now and have a great reputation and to be quite frank,they are about the only dry transfers left on the market.
I have in the past ordered S scale decals and mixed and matched them to make my own design.

Royce

[lvrr325]

Woodland Scenics has dry transfers in several lettering styles.  I've used some of the roman numbers on my locomotives.  Anything more than railroad initials will be tedious to apply, though, I would look into having decals made if possible. 

The data is really up to your own preference - it was/is primarily only required on revenue cars that are interchanged between roads.  Not a lot of narrow gauge roads connected to one another to do that.  When the car never leaves the home road, information on brake overhauls and load capacity and so on could just be kept in a written log someplace. 

[Mike_AA9ZY]

That makes a lot of sense and potentially saves me a bunch of time. Thanks!

[Anubis]

Hi Royce,

Many thanks for the link to Clover House.

As well as dry transfer lettering, the range of scratch building bits that he carries is amazing.... 

He only takes orders via snail mail and fax, however.


Time to fax an order or two.....

[lostcreekrr]

Have you considered using decals. I have used them for many years on my N Scale equipement and they are much better than dry transfers. Just take a little time and they look as if they are painted on once dulcote is applied . Micro Scale industries has a huge range of alphabet and numbers in HO and O scale in a range of colours.

[Kevin Strong]

Decals? Ugh!!! Hate 'em. Dry transfers--a little more expensive, but the trade-off in terms of not having to worry about surface prep, seating down around rivets and other details, proper adhesion, silvering, sealing, etc. is well worth it. I use decals only when I have to (i.e., one-offs where it's not worth it to have an entire sheet of dry transfers produced.) I have an ALPS printer, so custom decals aren't an issue for me to produce at home. I just hate the medium with the purplest of passions, so it's worth the expense to get sheets made up for freight cars, etc.

I use All-Out Graphics up in Vancouver to do all my custom dry transfer work. Including the set-up charge for the negative, you're looking at between $60 - $80 Canadian for a 9 x 12 sheet, depending on if you're using a "stock" color like black, white, gold, silver, etc. or multiple or custom-matched colors. Once they have the negative on file, subsequent sheets are less expensive. I can get 6 1:20.3 cars on a sheet, so I'd imagine you could easily do 15 or more O-scale cars per sheet. At that point, you're looking at around $4 or so per car for the lettering. That's roughly twice to three times the cost of custom decals from folks like Jeff Damerst (Shawmut car Shops) or Stan Cedarleaf (Cedarleaf Custom Decals) but as I mentioned above, they're infinitely easier to apply, and you needn't buy Solv-a-set which invariably gets knocked over and spilled midway through the project meaning you've got to stop and go by the hobby shop to pick up more, which means you buy that new locomotive that just came out as well, and before you know it...

Having said that, I'm not at all a fan of the Woodland Scenics or Letraset letter/number dry transfer sheets. First, the letter sets come with finite amounts of each letter, so you've got to buy enough sets to make sure you can spell the name of your railroad. If it's the "Aardvark & Arkansas Railroad," you're buying a bunch of extra z's, q's, and x's that you'll never use in order to get the amount of "a's" you'll need. And you're doing that for each piece of rolling stock, which can easily push your costs to $15, $20 per car. Then, you're applying the lettering one letter at a time, which gets harder to do the smaller the scale. Also, the shelf-life of the Woodland Scenics dry transfer letters isn't that great. If you don't use them within a year or so, the adhesive dries out and they're worthless. Again, wasted money. The adhesive on the All-Out and other commercial dry transfers I've used last much longer. (I've got some that are nearly 15 years old and still good!)

Whether you go with decals or dry transfers, it's definitely well worth it to have custom artwork done. That way everything's consistent, and you don't have to spend your time laying down individual letters and numbers. The two decal guys I mentioned above do very good work, and I've been dealing with All-Out for about three years now for my custom transfers.

Later,

K