Saved by the inkjet again

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.

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

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