The Little World

Having recently made a batch of bad decals, I determined to investigate the problem before printing the next sheet.

The surface of the previous ones was cracked and broken – and I reasoned that it was the brittle nature of the Tamiya Gloss Lacquer spray that did it. I looked out all the bottles of clear coat I had – and bought a spray can of fresh stuff – and set to work.

Targets were first – fortunately the Photoshops Elements program has any number of patterns that can be printed in primary colours. I ran up a sheet on white decal paper.

Then I tagged each target and sprayed or brushed the appropriate solution on the top. The samples were left to dry over several hours. Some were fine at this stage of the game – some could be instantly eliminated:

I suspect the aqueous nature of these three just dissolved the ink. These survived to the second round:

The final test would be application to a plastic surface. I chose scrap sheets of paper with a basic pattern on them – the experimental evidence could be soaked and scraped off the sheets later: