John Yucca
New Member
This is how I got my start:
I worked for Uncle Sam in Iwakuni Japan as a Corrosion Control Tech Rep for a period of time. I talked the powers that be and talked them into buying us a stencil machine to save money and reduce paint usage.
After I started getting good at it the same powers that be decided to redo MCAS Iwakuni's static display A-4 Skyhawk at the main gate in my facility. In anticipation of the project I took the Mil-Stnd-2161 which is the aircraft marking manual and made all the major aircraft decals in Corel Draw and outlined them for cutting.
Got the aircraft and had a Japanese contract crew come in and paint the thing. I made all the decals on our Roland PC-60 and my personal Roland Stika SX-12. Believe it or not I did most of them on the Stika.
Everything is a decal except the big WA on the tail and the National Insignia Markings on the sides of the fuselage. Both were much larger than the PC-60 and at the time I didn't possess the smarts to segment the jobs. In my defense I made an AWESOME national insignia in CorelDraw that I was hoping to use. I had to draw the National Insignias on the aircraft with a template or it's probably more accurate to say that I taught the Japanese crew leader how to draw one on paper first and he did much of it under my direct supervision.....and he did a fine job!
It was easier than it all looked, it's all right to spec as per the Mil Stnd and I personally thought it was a thing of beauty. You should have seen it before. It was a horrible looking creature.
The CO of the base told me we had preserved a piece of Naval History and he was right.
I often think of myself as a rank amateur to sign cutting and decal making but when I sit back and think about it........I made vector graphics for all the markings which was painstaking and time consuming (for me) and cut and applied all the stuff myself. I'm perhaps not the amateur I think I am.
http://homepage.mac.com/hagensieker/PhotoAlbum38.html
John
I worked for Uncle Sam in Iwakuni Japan as a Corrosion Control Tech Rep for a period of time. I talked the powers that be and talked them into buying us a stencil machine to save money and reduce paint usage.
After I started getting good at it the same powers that be decided to redo MCAS Iwakuni's static display A-4 Skyhawk at the main gate in my facility. In anticipation of the project I took the Mil-Stnd-2161 which is the aircraft marking manual and made all the major aircraft decals in Corel Draw and outlined them for cutting.
Got the aircraft and had a Japanese contract crew come in and paint the thing. I made all the decals on our Roland PC-60 and my personal Roland Stika SX-12. Believe it or not I did most of them on the Stika.
Everything is a decal except the big WA on the tail and the National Insignia Markings on the sides of the fuselage. Both were much larger than the PC-60 and at the time I didn't possess the smarts to segment the jobs. In my defense I made an AWESOME national insignia in CorelDraw that I was hoping to use. I had to draw the National Insignias on the aircraft with a template or it's probably more accurate to say that I taught the Japanese crew leader how to draw one on paper first and he did much of it under my direct supervision.....and he did a fine job!
It was easier than it all looked, it's all right to spec as per the Mil Stnd and I personally thought it was a thing of beauty. You should have seen it before. It was a horrible looking creature.
The CO of the base told me we had preserved a piece of Naval History and he was right.
I often think of myself as a rank amateur to sign cutting and decal making but when I sit back and think about it........I made vector graphics for all the markings which was painstaking and time consuming (for me) and cut and applied all the stuff myself. I'm perhaps not the amateur I think I am.
http://homepage.mac.com/hagensieker/PhotoAlbum38.html
John