i am looking for an non expensive way of producing my own decals any help would be useful

Basically you need decal paper for your printer, and decal paper is not cheap. I have made my own decals for some of my builds with an ink printer, but I have a theory about a laser printer being better for the purpose. Unless you are printing black decals they have a nasty habit of turning out transparent on clear decal paper. For other colors I have used white decal paper and that makes it difficult to make complex shapes. If I add all the time and costs for making the decals I think it is cheaper to buy after marked ones.

The Viking ship and numbers on this Leopard are home made.


Erik

I printed some camouflage decals from a pattern I downloaded and they turned out great. They were for the commander of a Luchs i was building as My figure camo painting leaves a lot to be desired. They were printed onto white paper because as Erik said they're a little translucent on clear paper. The only major problem I had was ensuring they had a good coating of klear so the inks wouldn't run when placed in water. You can see the jacket decal here.
http://armorama.co.uk/forums/93957&page=1

I had the problem of finding decals for a 1/144 scale Churchill AVRE and some other 1/144 models, and in the end I broke down and had them printed by a custom decal service:





They printed the decals on an ALPS printer onto very thin decal paper, and I'm well satisfied with the quality. They weren't expensive, either: At ca. 10 Euros for half an A4 sheet they were about as expensive if not cheaper than some commercially available aftermarket decals (I did, however, supply ready-to-print artwork, i.e. a CMYK-encoded vector graphics file).

I had them made by www.decalprint.de in Germany, but there are other firms all over the world. This site lists a few, and it also explains how to prepare your artwork:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~robdebie/models/decals.htm

Cheers, Peter