Decal Storage

Put them in a ziplock bag! best defense! If they are yellowed, put them in the sunshine. it will get rid of the nasty yellow!

I store mine in a 3 ring binder that I filled with the page protectors that my local office supply store carries.

I found the metal containers that come with the CD's we all are inundated with from Earthlink and AOL a pretty good place to put decals. It also gives me a chance to catagorize them in the different tins.

I kept it in my camera's humidity control cabinet. So far so good. Moist and dust free.

Storing your decals in a zip-lock bag is the easiest way to protect them from moisture. Also make sure that your storage location has an even temperature as heat will degrade decals.

If any of your kits are more than ten years old, the decals are suspect since you don't know how they were stored. You may want to buy some after market decals to use instead those furnished with the kit. You won't know that the decal will crack and break apart until you put them on your model. This happened to me with an old Monogram kit.

Curious about your old Monogram...I just so happend to have picked up a very old Monogram 1/48 P-40 the other day and the decal sheet seems to have seen better days. I'm  expecting them to be a total loss because sheet is a bit yellowed, and the decals show some cracking.

Although, I see the newer Revell kit (Revell bought Monogram, right?) all the time so a replacement sheet shouldn't be hard to find. By the way, got any good links to buy some more? I'm thinking of checking Ebay.

I would suggest that you not use those old Monogram decals. I recently built the Monogram 1/48 P-39 Airacobra which I had for at least 15 years. The decals weren't yellowed and had been stored properly but the glue on the larger decals never dried clear. Even using Future as a setting solution. Getting them off wasn't easy and the paint required some touch-up. A real pain on my camo paint job. I finished the kit with a combination of Monogram and after-market decals. The after-market decals look the best as they are thinner and adhered better to the finished kit.  I could have saved myself some grief by using after-market decals from the beginning. The cost of those decals is small compared to the problems that I encountered.

You could buy a new kit but why do that when after-market decals are so much better than the ones that Revell-Monogram includes in their kits.

I have bought a few kits off ebay and have had an excellent experience. I prefer that to dealing with an unknown seller on the web. ebay gives you some protection as a buyer if things go sour.

the other side of the coin on decals is when buying after market from your lhs you don't know how old they are many lhs don't sell them on a fast turnover basis

  i have purchased them 5 times and 1 set was bad due to age

 

DURR wrote:

the other side of the coin on decals is when buying after market from your lhs you don't know how old they are many lhs don't sell them on a fast turnover basis   i have purchased them 5 times and 1 set was bad due to age

But, on the other side of that coin, you could probably take them back. Any reputable shop is not going to refuse a refund or exchange if they sold you a defective item, unless it was bought on the understanding that the decals were old, and they didn't garuntee them? Just a thought.

eizzle wrote:

DURR wrote: the other side of the coin on decals is when buying after market from your lhs you don't know how old they are many lhs don't sell them on a fast turnover basis   i have purchased them 5 times and 1 set was bad due to age   But, on the other side of that coin, you could probably take them back. Any reputable shop is not going to refuse a refund or exchange if they sold you a defective item, unless it was bought on the understanding that the decals were old, and they didn't garuntee them? Just a thought.

  i did return them but it was more or less the dissapintment