See it. Make it.

[maihama eki]

Here is the decal film I use. The "Thin" is 8-10 um thick which makes it challenging to use, but it flows nicely over rough, uneven surfaces, or for example the raised lines on the box of the truck. With a solvent decal medium like Micro Sol, it gives excellent results.

 

https://www.sunnyscopa.com/products/laser-waterslide-decal-paper?variant=44756694991014

 

You can see they have versions for laser and inkjet, different paper sizes, clear and white background. They seem to have a rub-on/transfer version as well. I've never used it, but it sounds interesting. Make your own temporary tattoos as well!

 

I've been very happy with using it - excellent quality. 

[Madsing]

Very nice truck, it looks perfect, and very good use of 3D printing!

And thanks for the link to Sunnyscopa. They really have a wide variety of decal paper.

 

Marc

[maihama eki]

Continuing the theme of kei trucks, we bought some baked goods from a young woman that had parked this truck on the side of the street in Nippori last year.

 

It was all delicious - especially the melon pan. If you see this truck parked on the street in Tokyo, give them a try.

 

Now in n-scale, starting with the same Kato 23-508 "DioTown (N) Autos : Light Van & Light Truck" set.

 

[maihama eki]

One more. I spotted this Sagawa kei van in a YouTube video recently. I started with the silver van from the Kato set, cleaned it up a bit, painted the interior, and added some decals. I also converted the back seat to a platform and added some boxes that you can barely see in the photo.

 

 

A side note about printing decals...

 

Matching colors of very small printed items is a challenge. My laser printer prints in 4 colors - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black. All other colors are created by printing more or less dense patterns of these 4 colors. Darker blue is made by adding magenta and black dots on a solid area of the cyan. This looks fine when you print something large and view it normally, but when you print something small and look at it closely there are problems due to the slightly not-perfect alignment between the 4 different print heads. This is especially problematic for small characters - they start to look blurry or even become obscured. You can also get a result where a solid field appears to have stripes where the secondary colors are printed on top of the primary color.

 

In the case of the blue on the Sagawa logos, I got the best result by figuring out what combination of R-G-B in the graphics software would result in the printer just printing from the Cyan print head. This gave the sharpest result for the blue areas - especially the text. Unfortunately, the Sagawa logo is a darker - more like cornflower blue, so there isn't a perfect match.

 

The next problem is one I don't have an easy solution for - printing white. The SgH logo for example on the door actually has white in it. White is only printable with very special printers like an "Alps" printer. I could send my artwork off for printing by a service, but that is expensive for small projects like this. The printer may also balk at printing trademarked logos. You can print the decals on white decal medium, but that doesn't really work because then you have to cut out the decal super accurately to just leave the white you want - not possible on a decal that is only ~1 mm in size.

 

Anyway, there are sort of compromises to be made. Only a problem if you are super picky - like me.

 

Edited October 2 by maihama eki