Custom decals and my first logo car

While I love racing Hot Wheels, the one thing that got be sucked in to begin with is customizing. And not even customizing for racing (modding), just stripping and painting  a car was a pretty fun weekend project in my book. But that simple adventure didn’t last long, soon I wanted more.

There’s custom and then there’s custom

I’m sure you’ve seen the “real” custom diecast cars out there. Guys like Night Stalker and Dave Chang at KustomCity make some crazy awesome customs from scratch. They’re high end and ridiculously professional, completely collectible. I, on the other hand, don’t have the resources to make something so cool, few of us do. So I take the true hobbyist approach to customizing, meaning a little paint goes a long way.

The process of stripping and painting a car is practically old hat for me now. I can have a car chopped and repainted over a weekend. This is a great way to enter the hobby of diecast customizing, but I quickly wanted more. And that means decals.

My first step was just buying some pre-made decals at the hobby store and adding them onto my custom paint jobs. They worked great and looked sharp on several of my customs. But lets face it, the decals you find at the store are going to be limited, usually to car brand logos and racing numbers.

If you don’t like what you see, make your own

If you’re a pro customizer, you probably have a whole setup for making your own tampos and such, but the rest of have to go a little more low tech. I was surprised to find out that all you need to make your own custom decals is a color printer and the right paper. Water decals always seemed like something special to me, so discovering I could make my own was great.

What you need

• Inkjuet water slide decal paper (I can vouch for Testors)
• An inkjet printer. I’d recommend a nicer model, not the $30 Lexmark you got at Walmart
• Glossy clear coat spray, or Testors decal bonding spray
• Photoshop or other program for working with designs
• Hobby knife
• Ruler
• Water
• Q-Tips

Making your own decals

I bought some Testor’s decal paper from the hobby store, drew up my logo in Photoshop, and then printed it on my inkjet. And by golly, it worked great…sorta. Since this was my first attempt at doing custom decals, I went simple and just decided to make a Redline Derby logo car. Nothing fancy. However, make sure you design and print your designs at a higher DPI. Standard images you get off the internet are 72 DPI and not really suitable for printing. I recommend at least 250 DPI for your designs, but the higher the better your print out will look.

I followed all the directions that came with the paper set and it worked great up until the point where I saw you needed to coat your print out with decal bonding spray. I thought, “oh great, something else I have to buy,” but it turns out some simple gloss clear coat spray works the same way. I’m sure Testors brand spray works better, but a good solid coat of the same clear spray I use on cars worked fine.

If you don’t spray your printed decals with some sort of clear coat, your ink will run once it hits the water. I admit it took me a few tries to get it just right. You have to spray your decals down pretty well with that coating. A light coat really won’t do the trick, but at the same time, if you lay on your clear coat too heavy, too fast, it will make the ink fan out a little.

Slow and steady

After your decal is all dry, put it in water for a few seconds, then use your hobby knife to slide it off the backing and into place on your car. This is hard part because your decal will probably be pretty small and the decal paper is thinner than the pro retail decals. Your custom decals can rip easily. Once your decal is in place, I use a cotton swab to flatten it down, getting out any air bubbles and pressing it into any body contours.

The decal should dry and adhere in a couple minutes, and once it’s on, it’s on. I’m gonna say the only way to undo a poor decal job is to start over. Strip, paint, and try again. Once my decals were in place and dry, I gave the whole car a coat of gloss (as I always do) and everything held up fine. Now the car looked shiny new along with my own personal decals. Pretty cool.

One downside to the DIY decals is that the paper comes in clear or white background. If you go with the clear, like I did, that means you’re almost limited to using white or light paint backgrounds. If you go with the white background (which I haven’t used), I’m assuming to get a good result means crazy intricate cutting so you don’t have a white border around every decal. Depends how crazy you want to get, I suppose.

My first logo car

I chose to use Bread Box for my first try since it has plenty of real estate on the side of the truck. It’s not quite a Dairy Delivery or Motorhome, but there’s plenty of room for a good-sized design. The final product is good enough that I’m now willing to work on designing decals for a bigger model, like the Dairy Delivery. However, personally, I think it’s much cooler when I see custom decal designs on “normal” model cars. Part of me says that anyone can take a good design and make it work when then side of the car is basically a big billboard…but making custom decals look good on a Corvette or something is pretty sweet.

If you’re interested in taking your customizing to the next level beyond a simple strip-and-paint, making your own water slide decals isn’t a rough road to drive down. It takes a little time and the special paper, but at $10 for a several sheets, it’s a pretty good value because at 1:64 size you can get a lot of stickers out of one sheet. Give it a try, take a few photos and share them over in the forum.