Originally Posted by
dw01
Well, I'm hoping I can just carefully clean and mask the frame material decal.
Yes, the "N" decal is typical for an '81, but I got confused looking on-line at Nishiki bike photos trying to pin down head badge/decal dates,
I strongly suspect there are repainted bikes out there that originally had head tube decals but substituted the older badges because reproductions are readily available on eBay,
In worst case, everything can be reproduced, not without giving up perfection, but its still better than nothing.
Here's an unmolested auto-trace... not perfect, and from here to decal it would take a while, but as you see it's possible. I would prefer hand tracing although that takes ages to get good.
Down tube is easier, here's a quick hand-trace (top one in purple) after the catalog front page, but this could go to the prints hop after some fine tuning (round off all corners, equalize spacing around "'i"s and set wider letter gaps all over) already:
If you are not in a rush, set a watch on ebay and similar for international decal, Nishiki is really off my scope, but based on yours I bumped into an article, where the guy got his resprayed, and claimed he got orig. decals. from ebay. You can never know when the next pops up.