Looking for decals
 

Rookie team, and we need a to find a good place to print up our sponsor logos and such. Does anyone have suggestions of a good site with a decent turnaround time and good rates?

Re: Looking for decals
 

Hi David

Welcome to the wonderful world of FIRST.
You can make your own decals. There is a self adhesive sheet (can't remember name) you can buy that will fit into your printer so you can make your own.
Just go to your sponsors website , find a good logo (or get a good logo from your sponsor. jpeg, bmp etc) and print it off on the sheets.

Hope you have good first year. :)

Re: Looking for decals
 

http://vinyl-decals.com/

Just started using them this year. Team numbers at 5" height are about $1.65 (for 3 numbers). You can also have company decals printed, but it is limited to a handful of colors. A logo with millions of colors in it won't work from this company.

Re: Looking for decals
 

Find a local sign shop in town and ask if they would make you some decals. Most of the folks in that industry are great people and would gladly help you out.

Re: Looking for decals
 

Get the adhesive paper from staples or office depot. Use a color printer, or even better, a color photo printer, or best yet a color laser printer.

They also have iron-on transfer paper you can print off in a color printer so you can do dirt-cheap shirts if you're on a tight budget.

Re: Looking for decals
 

One piece of advice: if you can get vectorized logos from your sponsors, do that. It'll save a step for many graphics people, and generally yield nicer results. (Designing our shirt this year was a cakewalk.)

Last year, I printed off our side panels on a plotter here at school. The whole robot ran about $17, though your mileage may vary. You'd want to protect that, though--lamination alone helped a fair bit, but it still got pretty banged up over the season. Get some thin lexan if you go this route.

Re: Looking for decals
 

We just print ours on transparency (the stuff you use on old-school projectors) and stick it to the robot with spray-on adhesive.

Re: Looking for decals
 

now you tell us! we just visited the shirt people yesterday :)

And we'll probably go monochrome to save a bunch of time and money, our sponsors have too many colors in their logos!

We're trying just normal sticky label paper for the color laser printer for the logos on the robot...maybe we should print up a few extras as replacements if they get messed up.

Re: Looking for decals
 

We're planning on going along the route Billfred suggests and plotting full-color side panels for our robot that will sit inside 1/16" polycarbonate sheet.

Does anyone have any suggestions for reliable ways of mounting the plotted sheets to the inside of the polycarbonate? I guess we're looking for some sort of spray adhesive that dries clear. Any recommendations on that front?

We'd like to be able to remove the panels without fear of damaging the plotted sheets.

Re: Looking for decals
 

Madison,

I'm stewing on the same matter, and I can think of a few options.

Perhaps the easiest way I can think of is to get a second strip of polycarbonate running along the top and bottom of each panel and make your printed panels a smidge larger on those sides. Fold over, attach with glue, join the two (or more) pieces of polycarbonate in some visually-pleasing manner, and you're done.

For the weight-paranoid, I imagine you could try similar tricks by just folding the paper over the polycarbonate and attaching. You'd still have a bit of paper vulnerable, and you'd have to figure out a way to keep the folded part from being ugly, but otherwise it could work.

Re: Looking for decals
 

We print our graphics on a plotter(normal printer will work) and then use spray adhesive to glue them to a piece of lexan

Re: Looking for decals
 

We've got a 300dpi sponsor logo at 6" x 3.5" that should suffice, I think.
And we'll, hopefully, be doing ours in vectors, or at least a very large 300dpi image.