The Little World

You can learn a great deal from John Evans if you listen. Occasionally you have to feed him fruitcake but you do get results. However you have to listen carefully. I didn’t and learned a lot.

John advised me on how to decal effectively early in my attendance at the club. He told me to soak the decals very briefly and then lay them on a piece of tissue or paper towel until they were ready to slide off onto the model. Of course a little setting solution was a good idea as well, and I followed the advice. By and large it was good…with the occasional failure that I put down to my own clumsiness or the nasty nature of some eastern European decals.

Recently I was working with some home-printed decals using the fresh sheets of white decal paper sold by the NSW firm of Dr. Decal And Mr. Hyde (!) and found some problems. The preliminary soak of the decals was affecting them – there were roll-ups and tearing. I hasten to add they were done according to the normal inkjet practise and fine in themselves. But they were very large British roundels.

I wondered if I had heard John correctly all those years ago. I determined to try an experiment. Instead of any soaking, I laid the dry decal back-down on a sopping paper towel pad and let the water soak into it from behind. Lo, and behold…the decals slid off easily in 40 seconds and slipped onto the model’s wing perfectly. There was very little excess water to remove. They set down without a solution and went into all the creases and panel lines.

In the spirit of science, I am going to repeat this procedure with decals from a number of different makers to see if they work better. Tables when the experiment is under way…