Making Monokote lettering
by: John Hawkins

 

The lettering on this Ultimate needed to match the existing, ironed on Monokote, which was lost due to a repair. Never mind what the repair was due to! The first step might normally be to find the font that was used originally. Fortunately in this case though I had all the letters I needed. The "BLUE" was on one side and the "Hawk" on the other so I simply put the plane on a flatbed scanner and scanned it. It laid on quite flat and good results were had with no noticeable distortion. The size was a little off though. Adjusting the scaling factor of the scan or adjusting the size in a graphics editor could correct this. The way I did it however was to import it into a neat little CAD program called DeltaCad  and scale it directly to the size required and print as shown here. Now I had a stencil.

 

The paper was trimmed and taped over a piece of Monokote and then cut out using a plain old #11 Exacto knife blade.

 

There are special pivoting cutters used just for the purpose of cutting stencils and the like. I would have stolen the one my wife has to do this but she had it too well hidden. These self-healing mats are great by the way. They are easy on the blade and I don't know where the cut goes but it seems to disappear. Too bad our skin wasn't made out of the same stuff.  Oh, the cut goes right through the stencil and the film. The film backing was removed before cutting.  That wasn't actually intended. It just happened to be loose and fell off. Good thing though as it might have been a devil to get off after the letters were cut. It's a good idea to clean the chocolate chip cookie crumbs off the cutting mat first too.

 

 It's best to cut out any inside things first like the hollows in the "B". I made sure the letters were all cut free and then put them back in place in the stencil cutout.

 

 The next step was to take a piece of tape and lift the letters out with it. Here a piece of no name invisible tape was used but any type of tape that is not too sticky should be OK.The adhesive on this tape was a little aggressive but workable. Notice that the tape was kept near the top of the letters. The idea is to hold the letters in the same alignment that they were in the stencil. There is a product used by graphics people called "frisket" that could be used too. It is a peel and stick type with low adhesion and would cover all the letters, which would hold them exactly in position. I found that checking by placing the stencil over the letters in place that they matched the stencil as closely as I could determine.

 

 To make a reference line for placing the letters a piece of masking tape was used.

 

Next a piece of paper towel was dampened with some trim solvent, the bottom of each letter lifted and a very light film of solvent wiped on and then the letter was smoothed down.

 

The tape was then carefully peeled back from the top of the letters and the trim solvent process repeated.

 

The final step was to iron down with a warm iron at first and get out all the bubbles possible. When satisfied the heat was boosted up and the letters given a final weld down. So there we have it. There are very many fonts available on the 'net and elsewhere. To make them available in Windows programs, download and save them and then copy them to the fonts folder in Windows. You don't need a sophisticated program to manipulate the fonts. MS Paint has provision to skew and stretch in size and comes with Windows. (It can be installed through Windows setup in the add-remove programs dialogue found in control panel if not already installed on your system.) Hmmm....I bet people could come up with some pretty clever things to put on their planes!