Decal help needed...

[GordonD]

I mentioned in a previous topic that I was extremely frustrated with the decals for the Dragon Apollo 11 kit. Not that they're of poor quality or anything - it's just that they're so damn small! It's the maintenance stencils on the Service Module that I'm talking about: at 1/72 scale some of them are the size of a pencil point, and by the time I've cut them from the rest of the backing sheet there is very little paper available to hold them without the tweezers gripping the decal as well. Even if I do manage to grip just the paper, how do I persuade something that small to slide into place on the model? I tried using a cocktail stick but the decal seemed to want to cling to that rather than the model, to say nothing of damage to the decal itself.

I've managed to complete about three-quarters of them, but now I've reached the really small ones, and I'm sorely tempted just to leave them off, since you can hardly even see that they're there at all without a magnifying glass. Trouble is, I'd know they were missing, so I'd rather not do that.

Any suggestions?

[andym]

I mentioned in a previous topic that I was extremely frustrated with the decals for the Dragon Apollo 11 kit. Not that they're of poor quality or anything - it's just that they're so damn small! It's the maintenance stencils on the Service Module that I'm talking about: at 1/72 scale some of them are the size of a pencil point, and by the time I've cut them from the rest of the backing sheet there is very little paper available to hold them without the tweezers gripping the decal as well. Even if I do manage to grip just the paper, how do I persuade something that small to slide into place on the model? I tried using a cocktail stick but the decal seemed to want to cling to that rather than the model, to say nothing of damage to the decal itself.

I've managed to complete about three-quarters of them, but now I've reached the really small ones, and I'm sorely tempted just to leave them off, since you can hardly even see that they're there at all without a magnifying glass. Trouble is, I'd know they were missing, so I'd rather not do that.

Any suggestions?

I use a small clean paint brush to slide decals off the backing. With really small ones I often lay the wet backing paper, with the decal still on it, onto the models surface and slide the decal straight off onto the model surface. Also I pick the decal paper by its cut edges to pick it up.

HTH

Andy