The Little World

The intrepid SST team attempted to raise the dead…and apply the resultant zombies to scale models.

We have all had the disheartening experience of buying a bargain kit at a stash sale…only to discover that the decals have died long before the rest of the kit.

They are yellowed, cracked, and possibly covered with the remains of a protective paper sheet – glued firmly in the middle of the roundels. Horrible.

The conventional wisdom is to go to the hobby shop and buy fresh decals for the old kit. Easier said than done, if you live at the edge of the world as we do in Western Australia. There are few shops catering to us with sets of decals. If we order from Hannants in the UK, or some similar North American firm, we are hit with terrific postage charges. The price of the bargain stash kit climbs to a prohibitive level.

We are bound to either reprint the decals for ourselves by various means or revive the ones in the kit. Inkjet reprinting is possible for a number of patterns, but falls through when there is white, yellow, or grey lettering. Unless we can find ALPS printer, we’re stuck.

So SST took three sheets of time-expired Matchbox and Airfix decals and started to experiment. The kits from which they had been extracted have long since been built and decorated with new markings – these decals were expendable. In the spirit of ignorance, John and I pressed forward…