Bryan, Instead of painting the cabinet where the art work will be applied, I have been using several coats of polyurethane sanding between coats. It seems to do a great job sealing the wood and ends up with a surface as smooth as glass. Have you tried that, and if so do you think it is a good technique. Also, it appears that I have the same screen for the text as you do. How do you screen the patent text with the chocks on? I have to screen first then install the new chocks due to the size of the screen.
Steven
Steven, there's nothing wrong with the way you do it, but in my humble opinion, you're going a little farther than you have to. THE SURFACE YOU APPLY THE DECALS TO DOES NOT HAVE TO BE LIKE GLASS, but there's nothing wrong if it is. Here' what I do.
After sanding with 80 grit to remove glue and also after Bondo, I sand with 120 grit and finally 220 grit. For each of these steps, I'll go over each surface at least three times. With the final 220 grit, I'll go over everything at least four times. By the time I'm done, all that's left is the very, very minor wood grain. And I mean minor. Keep in mind, at this point, you'll never remove all the fine grain. While removing some, you'll simply develop more in other spots. It will never all go away. And as I said before, anything finer than 220 grit on bare wood is meaningless. I could go over it all with 320 grit but all I'm going to do is polish the wood instead of sand it.
Once primed, scuff sanded and painted, the first two pics show what my cabinet looks like. Needless to say, there's more sanding involved before artwork gets installed but that's coming up.
The next two show an extreme close up of an area that was Bondoed. The light scratches are from some scuff sanding I've already done. You'll notice the Bondoed area is "smooth as glass" and surrounding it are areas that show the fine grain I was talking about. Once the artwork is installed, you can look as close as you want to that same area and YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO SEE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE BONDOED AREAS AND THE AREAS WITH THE WOOD GRAIN SHOWING!!
Again, nothing wrong with the way you're doing it, but it really isn't necessary.
As for the patent text, I use the one in the last picture, not the one on the larger screen. These were made by a friend of mine, Matt Merfeld. He used one of my restores as a guide an had these made such that you simply slide the screen up against the chock, screen and it locates it perfectly.
001.JPG 003.JPG 006.JPG 009.JPG 005.JPG