The Little World

If your name is Stein, you always run the risk amongst the vulgar of being called Frankenstein.

I have accepted it, and make the most of it for comedic effect. But I mark down the worst offenders and send my assistant, Igor, to visit them on dark and stormy nights. I must show you the glass jars some day…

The problems that dead decals exhibit fall into several categories:

a. Yellowing of the printed pattern and the surrounding clear film.

b. Cracking over the printed surface.

c. Adhesion of external matter.

d. Loss of decal adhesive under the pattern.

e. Hardening of the support paper and inability to lift off.

Each of these needs to be addressed – it is hard enough to get a new standard decal to decorate a model successfully – any of the flaws listed above make it doubly or trebly so. o wonder people toss the sheets in the bin and send off for new decals – at a price that dwarfs the cost of he rest of he model.

Note: I must recognise at the start that there are people who do not need to resort to decals or transfers. They lay out patterns, cut stencils, and paint the markings and graphics they wish on their models. I stand in awe of them, and wish their brush every success.

For the rest of us, decals have been our friends and enemies ever since we opened our first kit. If our initial models were those of the 1950’s we remember very small decal sheets. Even prototypes that may have been vast canvases for the real painters were reduced to just a few transfers when we bought them at the corner shop.

We did not mind, as the ability to put on a roundel or a racing number on the side of a model completed it in our eyes. None of us knew about decal-softening agents nor did we need to. Silvering? Cracking? It was the RAF roundel or the USAF lettering and that was all we saw. And, to tell the truth, a lot of those decals went down a treat as we had painted the models in gloss colours.

Our chiefest sorrow is we are not 14 any more, and we’ve let the world scold us into better standards since then. At least we’ve got past acne…