Well what do you think of my dial scale?

[Eric H]

The little Airline set I bought a month or so ago had a badly deteriorated dial glass, it wouldn't look very good if I couldn't fix it so I fired up Photoshop and got to work.

This was printed on a transparency and glued to the back of a new piece of glass.

Pic 1 is the before, pic 2 is the after.

One minor problem is the white shadowing is no longer visible, most printers won't do white so it doesn't show up, also I glued it on with clear Lacquer and it didn't come out quite right, I need to find adhesive transparencies that are also 17" long, so far no luck on that.

[David Roper]

Bravo!

[jpdylon]

Very nice Eric!

[Tony V]

Thats awesome Eric! I've seen several of these and each one had a bad dial glass. Yours looks great now. Nice job!
-Tony

[MRX37]

That looks damn good!

[Steve McVoy]

After you finish your photoshop work, print the result on photo paper. Then take it to Kinko's and have them make a copy on clear stock using one of their color copiers. The whites will be maintained. They can also make copies 17" wide.

I've done this on several dial scales.

[Old1625]

You could've told me that the second picture was your set after you found another glass in pristine condition, and I'd have believed you.

[zenith2134]

Really nice job Eric! Lookin good.

[drh4683]

Very nice, excellent job!

[zenithfan1]

Great job!

[Dan Starnes]

Eric, that is a 10.
Dan

[Celt]

Excellent work!

[nasadowsk]

Nice. I guess the ONLY thing that'd top that would be to make a set of stencils and rescreen a piece of glass. Come to think of it, wouldn't it be great if there was a cheap way to print a stencil on a computer and do that? Actually, I bet it exists if you look hard enough. IIRC, these things were basically screen printed.

[kbmuri]

Superb work Eric.

Yes, there's a way to make stencils from a Photoshop drawing. I had a T-shirt printer make me a TV faceplate -- finished product is indistinguishable from NOS. He printed each color in black ink onto a green film, then put the film into a UV-light chamber for 30 minutes, then powerwash-sprayed away all the ink. What was left was a silkscreen. Then he squeegeed colored enamels thru the stencil onto the glass. The whole process was entertaining, but expensive.

Eric's solution looks 95% and do-it-yourself and inexpensive. Nice work.

[Eric H]

Hi gang, thank you for all the encouragement!

I'm pretty happy with the results so far but it could be better.

The dial was printed (in reverse) by Kinkos on transparent plastic with a
Laser printer then I sprayed it with gold to get the background,
this looks great but the problem I'm having is finding self
adhesive media large enough to print on that will also run through
a laser printer, most transparent media is 8.5X11 but the dial is
16.5" long.

I was told about something called clear acetate with a peel and
stick backing but I haven't had much luck finding it around here.

I was wondering if water slide decal paper might work?

Again though it's
tough to find in the right size without ordering a large quantity at a high price.

Here are a couple pictures showing the process, the first is with
the gold removed but the damage is not yet repaired, the second is
a sample of the finished product showing the shadowing, it's
actually off white or slightly blue, it is visible on my current
dial but it's more of a dark shadow not a white outline like it
originally was.

It took at least 10-12 hours with Photoshop to repair this thing, it literally had to be redrawn completely to get it to this point.
The small lettering is not from the original scan but was typed in with Pshop using the Lucidia Console Font.
I was even able to get the part number and "Made in U.S.A." back on it.
I was lucky that it was intact enough to restore.