[terrytripp]

The last two weeks have been less than encouraging for me. I have spent many hours working on getting the Epic Vortex screen printed. Every time I would leap over one hurdle, another hurdle appeared in its' place. With out going into a long drawn out saga here, I have decided, due to cost over runs and time restraints, to put the printing of the Epic Vortex F3P planes on hold. Possibly for good. The idea was to be able to get fully painted foamies at a cheap and reasonable price. Not that I can't do this at home, however, I was hoping on saving myself the time it takes to think up a design, lay it out, tape it up, and then finally paint it. It would have been much easier to just grab a pre-printed sheet of foam from my stock pile, lay on my templates and cut out a great looking foamy in less than fifteen minutes. With the amount of foamies that I go through in one season, that would have been a great time saver for me. I counted up the time I have spent on the designing, building, test flying, redesigning and finally, getting the plane ready for the screen printers. I have approximately 135 hours into it so far and no printing to show for it. Bummer. I could have built 8 foamies from scratch in that time. The final straw was the cost of screen printing escalated from costing me approximately $20 per copy to now in the range of $75 a copy. This is way too much and not worth the effort.
I will put out a challenge here. If anyone reading this forum has a connection to a reasonably priced screen printing service that can take AutoCad files and have them put on screens without me having to do any more work, I will be glad to look into it again. The cost per copy (assuming 50 copies) must be less than $20 a piece with all associated costs and taxes included.

Terry Tripp