Revelle rafale decals - lessons learned !

[aerodes]

Hi folks,

Since my last post about the 1/48 Rafale I've made slow progress. I've been putting the decals on the Revelle Rafale and at stages struggling with the little *************'s. One of the reasons is that I've not done this for some time but the Revelle decal plan shown on the last 2 pages of the build sheets and the decals themselves leave a lot to be desired. The decal plan itself is OK in parts but often down right useless - especially for the smaller decals that aren't symetrical and you need to the right orientation. In some areas the decal plan is different form the model itself - some panels not shown on the plan and some panels shown but not on the model. hmmmmmmm.

Big lesson learned - more research about the actual aircraft needed before doing the decals.

http://blog.naver.com/PostView.nhn?blogId=pwrangshion&logNo=110108175105

http://blog.naver.com/PostList.nhn?blogId=pwrangshion&from=postList&categoryNo=23

The two links habve some great photos. The second one you need to scroll over half way down the page (after the photos of the Neuron UAV) and there is a day by day report on operation to liberate Lybia with stacks of photos of the aircraft involed.

The decals themselves - well here goes.

The above 5 decals come as a single set on one slide. As you can see they don't fit the moulded features on the model - would have been better if I had cut them up and put them on separately then I might have been able to line up with the orange luminescent lighting strip and the emergency canopy release.But did'nt find this out until I was trying to pace the decal on the model! Obviously both port and starboard have same problem.

Managed to get the wing tip launcher decal the right way around after some research on one site but the Revelle decal map is useless for this one

Then I got to one of the real fun parts the fin decals for the Tiger meet version - hmmm.

The assembly process shows the port and st'bd VOR antennas glued in about mid assembly process - oh boy did I get this one wrong!

The decals have a small slot cut into them that matches the size of the slot for glueing on the antenna and this is much smaller than the antenna itself, I didn't realise this until I had the st'bd decal ready to appy and just about off the backing sheet. I had to cut off and piece the decal to get around it. To quote Eric Morecambe -you can see the join.

On the port side I englarged the slot before hand which has left me with a small black paint repair job. I've put a black ellipse around the shot of the repair

Next - the decal numbering - as you can see from the next shot there are 2 different decals numbered 34

Finally. I mamaged to get a copy of the decal sheet frorm the web and check it against the call up on the decal plan. This confirmed my suspicions - there aren't sufficient numbers of some of the small repeat decals to finish the job - especially if you wanted to do a diarama showing the full suite of stores included in the model kit.

Anyway it all adds to the rich tapestry of life and the head scatching has now made my bald patch bigger. But the model progresses - hopefully to a conclusion - soon (ish) -I think.

[HOUSTON]

Great job...looks very good