Hasegawa F-86D, a refugee from the NATO '50s GB

[giemme]

Great job with your home made decals, G!

 

 

Ciao

[Giorgio N]

Little update, with some good and some bad news...

Let's start from the positive: I managed to make a decent badge for the tail. The process was a bit complicated: first step was to design the basic white shield and convert to the format required by my Silhouette cutter. The shape was then cut on white decal paper.

Then I drew the badge, printed this on clear decal paper and applied on top of the white shield. I cut the white shield very slightly smaller than the decal as this has a black edge, the idea is that the black edge will cross over the end of the white shield to hide any white excess. The final result was quite good, although the white shield lets some of the background red paint show through

 

 

Then I started applying the national insignia, all coming from an Xtradecal sheet. These come with separate red bars, that is good as avoids registration problems. However they are not printed too well and the edges are not very straight, as if the printer used didn't have the required resolution... quite annoying on a set of aftermarket decals !

On the other hand these were the best decals I had, as the ones in a Miscroscale sheet have the bars not in perfect register, the ones in the sheet I used for this model are even worse and the ones in the Airfix F-86E kit are of different size...

Notice how I decided to follow the later arrangement of the national insignia on the wings:

 

 

At least the decals worked well with Microscale's liquids, not surprising as they are printed by Microscale for Xtradecals....

One side of the model that I've not shown yet is the lower, here shown with the national insignia in place and the wheel wells painted in interior green

 

 

I was a bit annoyed with the national insignia but the worse came later, when I started printing the USAF titles. Don't know why, I tried every setting and every kind of paper I have but I couldn't print a set of proper decals ! With some settings I had problems with the toner lifting, with others I had decals that were practically black, with others I had very visible pixelation... in the end I had to give up.

Of course the decal sheet for this aircraft has all titles in black instead of the correct Insignia Blue so I searched other kits and again, none had titles of the correct colour apart from a couple of Superscale sets.

Next step was to search for aftermarket products, I remembered an old Superscale sheet and found that Rocketeer also made a sheet. Of course both OOP and currently not available through the usual channels.

The model is currently still missing the titles, but I may have found a solution.... a couple years ago I saved a link to a small printing company that offered printing services for modellers. I checked to see if they are still around and not only they are but they seem to have expanded this service. I'm now planning to send them a file and have the titles printed for me. As the cost is fixed depending on the size of the sheet, I will cram how many titles into a single A5 page, so that I can have them for all my future USAF aircraft builds. Cost is IMHO very reasonable, and if this first attempt is succesful I can see a lot of other subjects being sorted in this way.

 

Almost forgot... the red warning band around the rear fuselage came from the sheet I bought to build this aircraft. Together with the white codes, it will remain the only part I've used. After this experience I doubt I'll go searching for old Microscale sheets on Ebay again...

 

[giemme]

1 hour ago, Giorgio N said:

the white shield lets some of the background red paint show through

I can't really see that, it looks spot on to me

1 hour ago, Giorgio N said:

I checked to see if they are still around and not only they are but they seem to have expanded this service

Could you name it, please? Or send me a PM, alternatively? TIA  

 

Ciao

Edited May 27, 2019 by giemme

[Terry1954]

Looking good Giorgio, despite all the challenges!

 

Terry