Gentlemen,
I've finally arrived at the point where I believe I can move forward on the cockpit detailing. As everyone knows from my previous postings, I've been holding myself back in effort to find a means of fabricating decals of my homemade stencils and data plates. With the decal option out, I decided to fall back on my Plan B, which is to use old fashion colored prints. I would take pictures of the stencils or instruments and then cut out the images, glue them to the appropriate areas.
My journey wasn't all that easy. Lots of trial and error took place. At first, I thought I could simply take a picture using the cell phone's camera, load the images into my antique laptop and then have the printer produce the results. This idea worked, but not without limitations. The laptop and printer sometimes did not alway "speak" to each other. When they did, the images were grainy and the small details were difficult to see.
I next used my old film camera. The results were much better, but the colors were somewhat bleached or were somewhat faded in comparison to what would be expected of a clear decal. I also had to take several shots at varying distances to get the size of the image desired. The commercial outlets did. not offer much in the way of customized sizes. They only offered standard print sizes that were spit out of their machine.
I've posted a few samples to illustrate:
The first picture shows the sub panel that is under the main instrument panel that is typical of the Mustang series. The small photo off to the upper left, is from the printer. As you can see, the image is grainy and the colors need a lot to be appreciated.
The image over the sub panel cut out was cut out from a colored print made from a film camera. As can easily be seen, the image from the film print is much better in color and in fine detail. Still, the fine detail is. bit fuzzy. I wanted to try once more a different approach.