Jump to content

Decal Stripes (Various widths and colours)


Mike

Recommended Posts

Decal Stripes (Various widths and colours)

Fantasy Printshop

 

Vehicles of any sort often have accented lines of colour either for aesthetic reasons or for functional ones such as de-icing boots on wings, or anti-abrasion coatings on leading edges.  As we all know, painting a line freehand is a fool's errand unless you're a qualified signwriter, so your other choice is masking off the line and spraying the paint and hoping you got the line width consistent, didn't wander off from the intended course of the line, and of course the prayers to the modelling gods that you don't get paint creeping under your masking tape.

 

For these reasons and many others such as convenience people sometimes turn to decal strips, or painted decal film for these applications, or as some folks do, to recreate canopy frames without the faff of masking.  Fantasy Printshop and others have long recognised the need for decal strip and produce sheets of various widths. I doubt however that anyone else has printed them in such a wide variety of colours, which include metallic.  They're not scale specific of course, so if you want a specific width, just use the following simple formula to work out which width you need.

 

Required Width in MM

Your Scale (e.g. 72, 48, 32 etc.)

 

The resulting number will give you the scale width, which you can then use to pick the correct (or nearest) width stripe from your sheet.  Helpfully, the widths of each stripe is printed at the top of each one so you don't need your micrometer, and each stripe comes in either 130mm lengths for the narrower ones, or 175mm lengths for the wider sheet, as there are two sheets available in each colour.  The narrow sheet ranges from 0.25mm to 9mm, while the wide sheet goes from 7mm to 12mm, and as you may have noticed is a bit larger.  There are seventeen colours in each size, with a couple of fluorescent colours, shades of grey, blue, green, red, silver, gold, black and white.  That's a lot of choice!

 

Narrow Stripes 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1.5, 1.9, 3.8, 5, 6.3, 9mm

 

narrow1.jpg

Black, Dark Blue, Grey 4, Grey 3, Grey 2, Grey 1, Gold, Silver, White

 

narrow2.jpg

Dark Red, Red, Dark Green, Dark Yellow, Translucent Yellow, Fluorescent Yellow, Fluorescent Orange

 

 

Wide Stripes 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12mm

 

wide1.jpg

Dark Red, White, Grey 1, Grey 2, Grey 3, Grey 4, Black

 

wide2.jpg

Silver, Gold, Dark Blue, Blue, Yellow, Fluorescent Yellow, Dark Yellow, Orange, Red, Peach

 

Fantasy Printshop print their decals with a nice thin glossy carrier film, and they go down nicely with a bit of decal solution, such as the green Mr Mark Softer by Gunze that I often use.  There's no registration to worry about, but the lines are crisp, dense, and the carrier film is so thin that I had to check under magnification that the stripes were individually covered and not over the whole sheet.  This will make hiding those edges a piece of cake compared to those thick leathery decals you sometimes get in older Tamiya or Hasegawa kits.

 

 

Conclusion

Decal strips are one of those accessories that come in VERY useful from time to time, and when you discover them for yourself, you wonder how you ever got along without them.  I recall using some on my old Mig-31 Foxhound build as black strips for the leading edges of the fins and some of the antennae, which made getting neat, crisp lines child's play.  This little bundle will get used more and more I suspect.

 

Very highly recommended.

 

bin.jpg

 

Review sample courtesy of

logo.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 months later...

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...