HP 41 Keyboard Overlays available finally!

[Michael Fehlhammer]

Whenever a new overlay was added to our collection, I had a student create an eps - File from a picture of the overlay, using a desktop publishing program. This eps-File can be handled by any print-studio.
Here you find an example:
Assembler_Keyboard_EPS

But I doubt that anyone will find a print studio that does the work better or cheaper.
I had to invest a lot of money in many (unsuccessful) attempts to cut the overlay material, for example. Even the final solution is far from perfect. Lately we encountered a problem with the latest batch of blank overlays concerning the quality of color ( brightness). The process of creation is very cumbersome: Each blank overlay has to be positioned individually by hand to a precision of one tenth of a millimeter - otherwise letters would be unreadable or lost.
But please, you can try to find someone, from my side there are no secrets about it, and I would be happy to get rid of the work to accept orders and forward them - even though there weren't much orders recently. But take into account that you have to invest more than thousand $ for testing. I doubt that "my" print studio owner ( who likely doesn't speak English) will explain all the details he learned about the printing process, including the final source of the material. Regarding the material I know that he found out that laser-cut overlays won't do the job; the surface would be contaminated by residues of the burned plastic which doesn't accept the paint. He now uses water-jet cut overlays.

Over the years I sold about 200 overlays only. Since
1. the community for the HP 71b and 75C is smaller
2. compared to the 41 there are only very few original overlays
3. there is no programmer-wizzard like Angel Martin for the other calculators who could create demand for new overlays as Angel did for the 41

you can easily imagine that a realistic estimation of the quantity of ordered HP 71b overlays will be below 50.
Unless you set a price per overlay at about $ 50,-, you probably will have to be ready to make big donations to the community. :-)
But if Bill Gates should come around the corner and say: "I'd like to have some overlays for the 71b/75C, price is not an issue", than I'll gladly have my student make the template and the print studio make some testing with the larger overlay format. :-)