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Saved by the inkjet again

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  • Member since
    November 2009
  • From: Twin Cities of Minnesota
Saved by the inkjet again
Posted by Don Stauffer on Thursday, September 10, 2015 12:24 PM

I was building an airliner (A 320) and had purchased aftermarket decals for a Northwest Airlines livery.  I neglected this time to scan the decals before starting application. I realize it was tempting fate, and it did bite me!  Like so many decals these days the decals was of the super thin variety.  There were  lots of warnings in the instructions about how thin they were and how to apply them without them looping or rolling over.  Still, it was one of those long, very narrow decals, with the Northwest name on it and an edge folded under and stuck to the other surface. It is impossible to unstick those things.  Fortunately, the Northwest name, part of the window row decal, was easy to isolate and pull off.

I could make a decal for just the name portion, but I had not scanned the sheet- shame on me.  Fortunately, the decal instruction sheet had a nice color side view showing location of all the decals, in about 89% size.  I scanned that, enlarged it by the appropriate amount, and printed a couple of copies.  The first attempt at applying one worked fine, and the project was saved without buying a new set of decals.  I'll be posting a photo of the project in the Airliners and Civil Aircraft forum soon.

 

Don Stauffer in Minnesota

  • Member since
    May 2009
  • From: Poland
Posted by Pawel on Thursday, September 10, 2015 4:59 PM

Hello Don!

Scanning the decals before starting to work is definitely a good thing to do. Many bad things can happen to them. I also managed to do some bad things with decals on some models and in some cases the fix was to draw a replacement in CorelDRAW!. What I do differently is I pay a company to print the decals for me. I guess I could buy an inkjet and decal paper and print them myself, but for this to be economically viable I'd probably have to break more than two or three decal sets a year, and I don't build this fast. The big plus of a professional decal printer is that they don't have a problem printing things that I use a lot, like the white US stars, bumper codes and such. They also print silver and gold.

Good luck with your build and have a nice day

Paweł

All comments and critique welcomed. Thanks for your honest opinions!

www.vietnam.net.pl

  • Member since
    August 2007
  • From: back country of SO-CAL, at the birth place of Naval Aviation
Posted by DUSTER on Friday, September 18, 2015 4:32 AM

Nice save Don.  It's always the "I shouda,woulda, coulda" that gets you ever time

Steve

Building the perfect model---just not quite yet  Confused

  • Member since
    November 2009
  • From: Twin Cities of Minnesota
Posted by Don Stauffer on Friday, September 18, 2015 9:23 AM

I just found a new trick.  I was building two airliners- an A 320 that the Northwest decal went on, and an Embrauer that used the same paint colors.  However, the United livery on the Embrauer had a gold stripe color seperation line between the white and gray.  I cut the decal (aftermarket decal that uses decal film covering whole sheet, requiring trimming to each decal.  I had trimmed too narrow, and the stripes rolled under in a few areas, ruining the decals.  I HAD scanned these decals before hand, but the scan plus my printer would not print a decent edge on the narrow stripes and the homemade decal stripes didn't look very good.

I bought a gold gel roller pen, and ruled out a few lines on the inkjet decal paper.  These looked better than my scan and print ones!  Putting them on model now and they look okay.

Don Stauffer in Minnesota

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