Transfers


The hetchins.org site shows the transfers that were used on the various models. H. Lloyd in the U.K., carries these transfers and I was able to order them from Nick at H. Lloyd. When I received the transfers, the downtube script was incorrect. The Hetchins site shows two types, the Brilliant had the earlier type and I was sent the later type. After several emails to and from Nick, he determined that he had sent the incorrect transfers to me. In fact, he realized that the last batch of the transfers he had made were the newer script and he thought they were the earlier version. He mentioned that the later version was something he had hastily drawn up for someone. He agreed to rectify the mistake, but it would take at least 2 months for this to take place. Because I wanted a faithful restoration of the frame, I set off to create the script transfer myself.



I mounted the frame in a stand and set my digital camera to take a close up of the decal. I actually took six photos, rotating the frame to get a direct shot of each section of the transfer. In Photoshop, I assembled the shots into a "flat" rendering of the transfer. I then enlarged the photo so that if printed would be just under one meter in length, printing that out in smaller sections and tracing the outline of the script on to tracing paper. These tracings were then scanned into Adobe Illustrator, converting it into a vector graphic. Over the course of about 20 hours, I cleaned up the image and had an accurate reproduction of the outline of the transfer. Then after another 15 or so hours I created the black text outlines, red shadow outlines, the "London N.15" text. To insure the sizing was correct, I had taped a piece of tracing paper to the frame and traced the actual tranfer. Finally the color separations for the actual printing were created in Photoshop.










The printing was done on an Alps MD series printer which is popular with people who make their own transfers. The printer uses a dry ink cartridge where the ink is transferred to the paper via heat. It is unique in that it will print all the normal colors and also white. They also have a metallic gold cartridge that provided the look for the gold in the script transfer. I sent the computer files to Matt Assenmacher who did a bit more editing to the red shadows in the "h" and "s" to match the originals exactly and he printed the final transfers. He commented that they were the nicest ones he had ever done.