Originally Posted by AZORCH

I was a graphics professional for a lot of years before I turned to design education. Creating and producing these graphics (a topic that has been revisited quite a few times on this forums, btw) can often be an arduous task. Even if you go down the road of producing your own water slide decals (which is not always a good option), and presuming you own or have access to the printing equipment, you still are going to have the raw costs of the water slide substrate (which is not cheap.) I've sourced numerous places to have decals made from my art files and each vendor is a new and often expensive adventure into figuring out what they can and cannot accomplish. It's not unusual for a printer to overstate their capabilities. I recently created Illustrator files for a fellow enthusiast and got costs for the production from a very trusted vendor who has produced excellent results. The vendor is also a personal friend and often cuts me a deal with "at cost" pricing. Even still, it was going to cost $25, and this is after I did all the hard work of reproducing in exacting detail all of the graphics (translation: hours and hours of time.) Recreating graphics can be tough, too, when the best you have for reference is often a curved, not-straight-on, distorted photo to work from. The upshot here is that $40 is a real bargain when you consider the hidden side of production.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that we've got a Yahoo! group specifically set up as a library for Illustrator vector files some of us have generated as re-creations of bicycle decals. Click here to join. New, high quality files are always welcomed; otherwise, download and use the ones we've collected so far for your own projects.