Any ideas how to repair this dial surround?

[andy1702]

Here's a problem that's been bugging me for a while. However it just got more urgent with the arrival of the phone pictured below.

Old GPO dial surrounds have the numbers / letters printed onto the reverse side of clear plastic, then a bacground colour painted over the top to seal them in. When put onto a phone the lettering shows through the right way round  because you're effectively looking at the reverse printing from the back, through the plastic. This is good because it means (in theory) that nothing can rub off with wear.

The problem is that over many years some of the paint comes off the ring, so when the ring slides against the phone body, which it does a bit when taking the case on and off, then thenumbers and the background paint start to look flakey and eventually disappear.

There are some poor reproduction parts out there, but they just have the lettering screen printed onto the upper face of coloured plastic, which is wrong and also won't last.

So I was wondering... Assuming I can get all the old paint off or even get new clear rings made, does anyone have any ideas how to get the white lettering on the back? Once the lettering is on I can just paint over it for the background colour. But it's the lettering, which needs to be applied in reverse (mirror) letters that's the hard part.

Andy.

[twocvbloke]

I haven't seen any techniques used to do such repairs or restoration to those dial surrounds, not an easy task considering that anything applied to the dial ring has to be strong enough to resist just fitting the thing to the case (potential to scrape off your hard work and all)...

One thing that comes to mind are waterslide decals (the sort you use to make scale models look pretty), for this colour phone, you'd need a printer that can apply white ink though (inkjet or laser) which aren't cheap, but make up a printable dial ring template onto the stuff, apply, trim, and spray the back with an appropriately coloured paint...

[Bill]

for this colour phone, you'd need a printer that can apply white ink though (inkjet or laser) which aren't cheap

I haven't done this, so just asking. Waterslide decal paper is available in white. Could you set up your graphic to print the background, and leaving the unprinted white of the numbers to show?

Bill

[twocvbloke]

Could you set up your graphic to print the background, and leaving the unprinted white of the numbers to show?

You could, but getting the colour to match can be quite tricky, as what is seen onscreen doesn't always tally up with what the printer prints out unless using adobe photoshop and have printed off a colour chart (and I don't know how to do that as I rarely use APS)...