Best Of New Brass EP-2 assembly & Mod clinic

[u18b]

It looks good Peter.
Thanks.

[u18b]

And now......

A little after mid-night dreaming for our Milwaukee Road fans......

[nkalanaga]

Now all we need is an EF-1 to finish the set.  Or EF-2, EF-3. EF-5...

I'm looking forward to the Little Joe article.  May not DO the work, do to limited skills, but it'll be fun to see what you have to do to make the things usable. 

[u18b]

EP-2 is still slightly on pause.
I really appreciate Peteski helping out on the decals.

I've worked hard on the Little Joe.  Drive train totally repaired.  Required creativity to fix.

I still need to completely disassemble the trucks with an issue to address (besides cleaning.)  Hope to have a document up in about a week.


One of the next steps on the EP-2 will be to strip the boiler room by sandblasting.
Re-primer.
Re-paint.
Ready for new decals.

The main cabs are fine and are almost ready to finish the decals.

[peteski]

Decals are done, and the writeup is coming soon.

[peteski]

The decals.
First I tried some color matching.  Alps printers do really well when using solid colors. But any time a color has to be printed which will print out using halftones (dots of the CYMK, or cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks), the result is rather coarse dot pattern (when viewed from a close-up N scale perspective).  For more details on different printing methods using Alps click here to see an excellent website tutorial created by one of the Alps groups members: Rob de Bie.

In this instance, to minimize the need for halftoning all the CYMK inks I decided to utilize the orange background to tint (darken) the final color of the lettering on the decal. Normally when colored Alps decals will be applied over non-white model I print a layer of white ink first (to provide a white base for the translucent CYM inks), then print the CYM inks over the white. But in this instance I took the advantage of the orange background to darken the Alps-printed image of the letters.

I first printed some color samples (chosen by eye) on clear decal film.


I then applied these to the orange paint chip from Ron.  The result will be shown in another photo further below.

I took the artwork Ron and I worked on and assembled into a print-ready artwork.  For printing special colors (like silver and gold) I use different layers in Corel Draw.  Here is the color layer (this will be printed in full CYMK color mode).


On a separate layer I created the artwork to be printed in metallic gold. Everything that is black will print out as gold.


Yet on another separate layer I placed all the silver colored images (again in black).  Ignore the large "MILWAUKEE" artwork - I forgot to turn of another test layer I was dealing with.


Then I printed the decal in multiple passes (with the paper retained in the printed between the passes).  Here is the resulting printout (along with a color swatch I used for matching colors). C=42 M=100 Y=10 K=0 (over orange background) is the closest to the maroon paint (the extreme right side of the color chip).


Closeup of the lettering,


Here is the decal I printed compared to the other Alps-printed decal Ron bought.
The decal Ron bought has a very coarse halftone pattern shown in the letters. Also the gold has a mesh-like or dot-like pattern in it. I had a similar (but less severe) problem with gold ink in the past. As I recall, the pattern was on the ribbon itself.



Then there is the silver lettering. Again, comparing the decal Ron bought to the one we created.  Our artwork is slightly shorter to better fit the model.


I'll be shipping these off to Ron on Monday. Hopefully he will be able to continue his build by the middle of the week.

EDIT: minor corrections.
EDIT: Photobucket/TRW photo switch

[u18b]

Dang!   

Wow.

[bbussey]

Outstanding Alps printing work.

[Scottl]

Great work Peteski.  I've learned a lot through this thread.

[u18b]

Hey Peteski,

Explain what half-toning is.

Well, you already did that.  But what I mean is..... you got SOLID colors out of the printer.

What would have changed for you to get the half-tone lines and/or dots.

Is it a certain Corel setting?
Printer setting?

Is it some CYMK setting?

I know you used solid colors, but what exactly did you do that the other guy did not?

[peteski]

Hey Peteski,

Explain what half-toning is.

Well, you already did that.  But what I mean is..... you got SOLID colors out of the printer.

What would have changed for you to get the half-tone lines and/or dots.

Is it a certain Corel setting?
Printer setting?

Is it some CYMK setting?

I know you used solid colors, but what exactly did you do that the other guy did not?

Halftoning is explained nicely here and for more details go here . It is a method of reproducing many colors using just 4 primary color inks (CYMK).  In this instance it is all part of printer settings (not Corel).  But Corel (for professional printing jobs) is also capable of producing halftone screens as its output. But in this instance it sends what is visible on the screen to the printer driver. The Alps print driver converts them to halftones (according to the settings I pock under printer properties).

Where most contemporary ink jet printers are capable of printing very small dots and use a scatter technique (instead of screens), Alps printer cannot do that.  You would have to use fairly strong magnification to see any dots in ink jet printouts.  Alps printouts (even printed at the finest halftone setting) still have visible dots or patterns.  Here is an example of Alps printouts at various halftone (printing quality) settings.


That image was taken form the website I mentioned in my previous post: http://robdebie.home.xs4all.nl/models/decals.htm (specifically from the Standard mode - Dither printing section). That website has excellent Alps info - I could just copy/paste it here, but I think that if someone is really interested in the way Alps prints, they would benefit by reading through that webpage.  That also includes explanation of what spot colors are vs. halftone printing (relating to Alps).

The person who printed your decal used halftone printing to come up with a color of the letters which approximates maroon. But for some reason he did not use the highest quality (highest halftone) print setting.

As far as gold goes, I'm not exactly sure why his was all broken up into a mesh-like printing. I once had a a gold cartridge where the ink ribbon already had a mesh-like texture on it for some reason. When printing gold areas would show that pattern (even when printed as a solid color). But it was much finer and less noticeable.  The current gold ink cartridge I use prints perfectly smooth gold ink.  The other possibility is that the artwork he used for gold was not solid black. If the artwork is non-black the spot color printout will be halftoned at 85lpi.

As far as the letters I printed having a solid color - it does have very slight halftoning (you can see that in this picture).

There are small dark blue dots over the solid magenta background (those dots are actually cyan but the magenta and cyan result in dark blue).  But I selected the highest quality printing (called VPhoto, which produces a finer 190lpi halftones). I also utilized the dark orange background of the paint the decal will be applied over to achieve the maroon color. That also reduces the amount of halftone dots needed  in the lettering color.  There are lots of tricks which can be used when using Alps printers.

[u18b]

Peteski,
I really appreciate your explanations.

Where most contemporary ink jet printers are capable of printing very small dots and use a scatter technique (instead of screens), Alps printer cannot do that.  You would have to use fairly strong magnification to see any dots in ink jet printouts. 

So this basic process you have outline should work for many (not all) colors using ink jet printers.  Since we don't have white, we are limited.


So my next question is probably an art question.

How did you know to base most of your colors (your starting point) on a basic magenta.  Why not green or some other color.

Sort of like a math problem.....

Orange + X = maroon

How did you know what X was approximately?

Do you have some kind of color wheel or something (I know an art student who had one, but have no idea how it works)?
Or a computer function.

[Sokramiketes]

The most comprehensive color charts I've seen for Alps are here:

http://robdebie.home.xs4all.nl/models/decals.htm

[peteski]

The most comprehensive color charts I've seen for Alps are here:

http://robdebie.home.xs4all.nl/models/decals.htm

Yeah, I already posted this link twice in this thread (recently). 

Ron,  to answer your question, CYMK color printers use a subtractive color printing method (unlike the additive color method used in computer color monitors).  That is why it is almost impossible to color match what you see on the computer screen to what the printer prints out.

For good tutorials about those methods see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subtractive_color and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Additive_color

As far as how I come up with matches goes, I do have a color wheel for reference, but in the end I do it by eye and experience.   

Trying to get the correct color using printers where halftones can be used without problem (printers like ink jets which print small enough dots and which use scatter technique for halftones) is not too difficult. But with Alps printer's limitations one must result to some totally unconventional printing techniques to try to come up with a correct color.   The spot color charts mentioned are a big help, but there is still lots of tricks to be learned by experience.  Like me using the orange background color of the model to tint and darken the color of the decal in order to arrive at a maroon color with minimal amount of visible halftoning.

How I did that?  Using my familiarity with the subtractive color model, I started by printing a swatch of solid cyan ink which I then applied over the orange paint chip you supplied.  Then I looked at the result and I knew I needed to darken it and make it more blue.  Blue is made up from cyan and magenta and I was already starting with a solid magenta in the color I was printing. That is why I added more cyan to the color. I started printing several more swatches with variosu proportions of cyan added to magenta.  But if I added too much cyan the color became too blue.  I added a touch of yellow which darkened the final color.  So the final color was based on semi-educated experimentation. 

[u18b]

Got Peteski's decals yesterday.

Wow.  They are absolutely gorgeous!

And one thing he did that never occured to me was-  he placed the main herald decal that I needed all in the correct position.

In other words, on the old decal sheet, I applied THREE decals. 
One for the big herald-  MILWAUKEE
One for the Road number- E3 (that was the one that was wrong for this model)
and one for the class- EP2

The way Peteski printed them, all three are in the correct position and can be applied as one decal.
Great thinking.

And I wish I had his silver nose decals before now.  They are much superior to the other guy's.  But what's done is done.  I can't go back now and paint some more orange over that one little spot without messing up the whole thing.

Hmmmmm.  But if I strip my RTR one day..... 


And by the way, I want to make sure everyone knows that I'm not knocking Streamstyle Graphics.  His decals are accurate for all other Railroad Fair EP-2s-- just not this one.

It wasn't until this thread that I stumbled upon that fact that the unit at the actual Fair was different.
So those other decals are accurate for E2, E4, and E5.

Peteski's are accurate for E3.

Hopefully, I can get some sandblasting done today.
Along with the primer.