> Thanks for sharing your work, Grant. I've been thinking about some
> transfer paper I bought at a computer show. You print on the special
> medium, and then iron it onto cloth, specifically T-shirts and the like.
> This might not be as good an image, but it sure does distance the glass
> from expensive machines! The paper is designed to be used in color
> printers. Wonder if anyone has tried this yet? TNX, Scotty

Scotty, The transfer paper you are describing works fine for what it is designed to do. But it wouldn't work for putting an image on your boat. It leaves the image on the fabric as a rather stiff rubbery deposit. Don't expect it would epoxy on at all - just make a mess.

Running fabric directly through a printer is actually realitively easy. It just needs to be on some kind of backing. The simplest way to do it is to iron it onto a piece of the plastic coated freezer paper. Lay down the fabric, put the freezer paper on top plastic side down, and iron at high heat on the non-plastic side of the paper(Don't iron on the plastic side!!! mess, mess, mess). Trim the resulting sandwich to size (make sure that the fabric covers all of the paper) and run it through. Alternatively, you can buy fabric already on a backing ($$$$). This works on inkjet printers really well. This does not work with synthetic fabrics (silk works best followed by linen and cotton), thus I didn't attempt it on glass cloth. I have a project coming up where I will be running hundreds of such sheets through my Epson 1520. BTW inkjet ink fades rapidly with exposure to light so it wouldn't be a good option for images on kayaks. You can, for a bit more $$ get ink cartridges with fadeproof archival ink which is supposed to last 100 years.

Laser printers (and photocopiers) will print on synthetic substrates (including glass cloth) since they fuse the image to the substrate. The reason that I did not iron the glass cloth to freezer paper to run it through is that I was concerned that there would be a residue of the plastic coating on the glass cloth that would show up through the epoxy. But maybe it would be OK, will have to try it.

Anyhow, running fabric through expensive machines is not a problem. Just be sure: 1. It is fastened to a suitable substrate. (a medium to heavy weight paper works best) 2. There are no loose threads or fibers sticking out which could be caught in the mechanism.

Hope this helps clarify things.

Grant