Hello William,

Sounds like you put a lot of thought into that and I'll bet it turned out great.  You might want to look at the 3M website. . . They make a clear printer film that you can use in most any Black & White or Color copier/printer. I used some a few years back on a small furniture project that was sealed in Urethane and it worked great.

Happy SUP'ing,

JP

   Hi JP

Before I tried rice paper, I tried the 3M Transparency film you mention (we used to use it to make AV slides for overhead projectors and I had some left from those old days before Power Point).  I printed the footprint image on an ink jet printer which took the film through the printer rollers without any backing.  When I epoxyed the transparency onto a sample piece of plywood, the edges of the film remained visible. The rice paper is a real pain to use, but leaves no visible edge.

Thanks for the comments.

William,

Any chance you could post some pictures?

When I did the duck graphic for my WD12 I used backer paper like you mention, but attached with plain old scotch tape only at the front end to keep the rollers from eating it. Worked great and was less messy than rubber cement.

Of course, with paint-footed grandkids running around all over the place, less mess was probably not a big consideration. (And the parents were probably muttering about children playing unsupervised with grandpa).

Have fun,

Laszlo

���Hi Laszlo I tried attaching the front end of the rice paper to a sheet of copy paper, but my printer has push rollers that crumbled up the paper from the back end. I used to use rubber cement to paste up a newspaper in the old days of lead type setters and before computers, so rubber cement is old hat. I also tried printing the rice paper with a laser printer, but a strange halo effect that looked like flames encircled the image. I think the laser toner did not fuse well with the rice paper. I have taken photos and uploaded them to tinypic, but when I try to add them to this post there is no bar to click on and no place to paste the URL to add photos.

Post you links then. That way we can follow them manually.

Makes sense about the rollers. I used a laser printer on rice paper and had no halo. I did, however, have to adjust the darkness control to use less ink when it was humid. I think that rice paper sucks the water out of the air.

Laszlo

   The footprint photo is above.  You may recognize the crab image.  I bought a brown wooden crab onlay from CLC. I colored the crab onlay with orange, green and blue stain, layed it color side down on the copier then printed the image on rice paper.  We regularly see swimming blue crabs when we paddle on the lower Potomac River at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.

  If you can find it try Japanese tissue.  It's what model airplane builders used for many years to cover with.  It's lighter and will not show the low glare that rice paper does. Old hobby shops or a real balsa kit from the 50's will have it.  I also use a roll of TP to soak up the excess epoxy whenever I apply epoxy.  Roll 2ft on then remove.  Repeat.  No puddies of epoxy this way & you will shave a few pounds of epoxy from your boat.   Epoxy is heavy!