by Don Johnson
If you have ever put a model car or airplane together than you retail out lets for this product will come up. It comes in different
are already familiar with water slide decals. In issue #15 of Air- sizes in either white or clear; for this example I used 8.5 by 11
brush Techniqyue Magazine Dan Bizzaro showed his technique inch sheets of clear water slide.
for incorporating the use of water slide in motorcycle custom Materials, equipment I used: 8.5 by 11 sheet of transparent
painting here I will fill you in on my experience using it in motor- water slide, House of Kolor SG 100, House of Kolor base coats,
cycle helmet custom painting. Gravity feed airbrushes and Sata Mini Jet, Fine line tape, 3 M
If you are interested in purchasing some Water Slide paper
masking tape.
Google the word Water Slide Decal and any number of On Line
This project is one of my first using more than one sheet of water slide and so I choose
a karting helmet for my son, Cody to experiment on. Working the best technique out and
to make sure it will hold up before I used it on a customer’s helmet being the goal. Before
I use Cody’s helmet for this I try several different techniques out on an old helmet I have
laying around the shop just for test projects like this.
You transfer the design to the water decal paper using an image program like Photo-
shop and printing it off on your inkjet printer. Pretty easy stuff and it produces some
pretty nice decals you can use to enhance your design. I don’t think I would try covering
an entire surface such as a helmet with the water slide but using small pieces here and
there should work out fine.
I have used single pieces of water slide before
but with this design I will be using several piec-
es that go all the way around the helmet. The
clear coat will not bit down thru this stuff so
the adhesion has to be good or we are going
to end up with sand paper in hand redoing it
all.
After you have printed your design off on your
ink jet printer you will need to apply a coat or
two of an inter coat clear such as House of
Kolor SG 100 to keep the ink from running
when you apply any paint or clear coat.
As a backing for the silver base I would
apply later the helmet was based in
gray and clear coated. You want to ap-
ply the water slide over the clear coat
not a base paint as I believe you’ll have
some major adhesion problems doing
so. I tend to try and get the hard parts
of a design out of the way first so here
I’ll start with the water slide get that in
place and continue with the rest of the
design.
Sense I’m using clear water slide there will need to be a base ter slide design. With the back ground color in place I apply one
the color of my design, which in this case is money. Over the coat of UC35 House of Kolor clear coat and give that time to
base gray I apply a coat of a color I mixed up using House of dry before scuffing the entire surface with a medium Scotch
Kolor base colors, this will be the back ground color for my wa-
Brite pad.
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