need help making headstock decals

[steve flicker]

Hey wanted to see if anyone can toss some knowledge my way. Been trying to make decals with my company name to put on headstocks of electric instruments I'm building.I got the graphic made up and a local artshop printed them but it wasn't what i wanted. What i want is a three piece decal, with a backing paper, a clear plastic that peals up with the lettering on it, then you anneal it to the wood and once again remove the clear plastic leaving the lettering on the wood. The big problem has been i don't know what this is called, or where to get it done. hoping someone here can help me out, I've seen some great looking ones on this site.

[Alain Lambert]

Dry pressure transfer?
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_transfer‎

[John Catto]

3 ways to do this, each have their own points.

Decals: Work well for black and colours when over light or midtoned wood. Made professionally they used to be silkscreened but these days are either inkjet or laser. My experience says that the laser ones work considerably better for guitars. The reason being fat the inkjet ones alway have to have a few coats of lacquer shot on them (usually acrylic) to keep them from running under finish and the water used in application. This gives you a visible decal line which is a bit of a put off. Laser decals don't require that since laser printers essentially melt plastic onto the surface and so are fast already, as a result they tend to melt into the finish with no visible lines. Metallics are possible using the now out of production (?) Thermal wax printers that used to have metallic options, I'm guessing you can use the laser paper with these and skip the overcoating.

Dry Transfer: As mentioned above. Works really well, kind of expensive for multiple colours but it's an option. I believe they are produced using a silk screen process. Metallics are a standard colour and metallic foil is a more money option. 4D modelshop in the UK do them http://modelshop.co.uk/Static/WorkShop/Dry-Transfers , Letraset err. used to, may still, and I'm sure there are other similar places offering the service if you dig around.

Silk Screening: No cons really other than you need to learn to silk screen so that's a whole skill set in itself.

Ah, almost forgot cad cut vinyl. Lots of places offer this now for single colours. I think the only proviso would be that the artwork would have to be in a vector based format (CAD or Illustrator etc.) to drive the cutter.

[steve flicker]

hey, wanted to say a big thank you to Alain Lambert and John Catto, in the process of getting labels made. it's alot easier to find what you want when you know what it's called.

[Alain Lambert]

Steeve, would you share your findings?