I had an idea last night regarding cheap foil labels on the pack.
As you may know I’ve been building some Real Ghostbusters Style PKE’s. Well, for the screens on those, I’ve been getting transparencies printed at Staples.
Last night it occured to me that since you can print red on a transparency, you could take your transparency, and glue some aluminum foil to the back of it with some transparent glue, and voila, labels with red text on foil.
Not exactly like real foil labels, but transparencies are only a buck to get printed.
There is also another trick you could do if you don’t want the plastic coating, but you probably want to use thicker aluminum for it, and I don’t know how you’d get that cut to the right shape for the label, but the trick is to get a laser print onto photo paper (may need to specifically be inkjet photo paper, but must be a laser printer) and then placing that face down onto your aluminum, apply iron with a lot of pressure. The photo paper will stick, and then you soak it in water for an hour or so, and rub the paper off, and the ink will stay on the metal. People use this for making printed circuit boards. The ink prevents the etch from etching the copper off under it.
The main downside to these methods is the red ink might be kinda dark on the aluminum background.
As for the first suggestion… people have done it this way. They get foil tape from Home Depot or Lowe’s than they print on clear stickers and put the stickers on the foil tape.
As for the 2nd suggestion, I never heard of this trick. If I got the information correct, after you print it on photo paper and iron it on the foil, the letters will come out backwards. So that means you have to print backwards before you do this.
Think you’re right there, it’s kinda like an iron on transfer right? Interesting ideas, I have been wanting to make the bumper, top red and HGA stickers foil, may have to look into this
If you look at the pics of my pack, and the wip build description, thats pretty muchg what I did.
Staples sells a clear sticker “paper”, 10 sheets for about $6 or so. I printed out what we needed, and then carefully stuck them to the shiny side of aluminum foil.
I cut those out, and then used spray glue to glue them onto our packs. While not super shiney exactly like a real foil label, for the price difference I think they look fine.
Also be sure to put a clear coat over the top of the printing clear paper as well for waterproofing.. and do it after you cut them out, so the edges are sealed as well.
I like the sticker idea. Though it seems like if you go that route you’ll be paying $6 for just three sheets of sticker paper. I guess that’s not bad if you’re doing three packs, and it’s still cheaper than the real foil stickers, but not that much cheaper.
Yeah that label paper is what we used. Our packs though had 10 sheets, and were less then $10.. there was also a $5 avery rebate going on at the time as well. I think we only used one sheet, and still have 8 or 9.
If I remember right, I gave the woman a $5 and got minor change back.
If you buy it open it up and check it out!! Some stole 3 sheets out of all the packs they had, and we assembled one complete pack from them.