>I have seen really good looking custom decals on people's elesctonics
>cases/enclosures.  Even one-off's can look pretty professional with these.
> Where are they obtained?  Can any corner printing shop do these, or do
>you ahve to special order them?  Is there an outfit that can do custom
>silkscreens for this purpose?
>
>Obviously PC board mfrs do silkscreens for PC board art, which us one-off
>labs never mess around with.  I wonder how they get them made?

There is another process known 'loosely' as "tampon printing". I have seen
this done, and the way it works is to have a brass sheet with the desired
design etched into the surface using a chemical milling or etching process.
The depth of the etch determines how much paint is applied to each printing.
The paint is deposited in the etched plate using a wipe process similar to
that used to squeeze the paint through a silkscreen. A soft rubber pad is
then pressed onto the plate to pick up the paint, and then pressed onto the
item to be printed. If necessary a second print is done. The machinery I saw
doing this was producing model railway wagons, and the printing is that fine
you needed a magnifying glass to read it, but it was all there. The paint
being used was a water based paint, which was quick enough drying that the
machine could do a second imprint of the same pattern in the 10-15 seconds
it took the machine to cycle the plate back, load it with paint, have the
pad pick up the paint, and cycle the body back for printing.

The rubber pad is pressed onto the work, not rolled in any way, so they had
various shaped pads according to the area they needed to cover for each
printing. Apart from some experimentation to get the etch depth of the plate
correct, and to find a suitable pad, this struck me as a viable one-off
printing system, for doing very small runs of one's and two's if necessary.

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