Sometimes,
you meet an unexpected hardship at the very moment you thought the worst was
behind you. When I started to build the Walthers tugboat kit, I was pretty sure
painting and assembly would be where would lie my best efforts. So much for
that foresight! The decals proved to be a big challenge.
The decals
provided with the kit are utter garbage and worthless. The decal film is thick
as an acetate sheet which makes it impossible to stick decently to the model
thus enabling a lot of air to be trapped. Rejoice! Except for the Erie logo,
the ship name plate is too small and unprototypical and only one is provided
while there were 3 of them on the wheel house. To make things worse, they didn’t
provide the white ship name lettering painted on the hull (I need four of
them).
As you can
expect, I was in a pinch. I decided to try my luck with the decals, but the
results were extremely bad because the white decals are translucent. Imagine,
it’s a brand new paint job and the logo is badly faded! I had to remove the
decal the hard way, sand the part and repaint.
It was time
to look for suitable decals. Unfortunately, Erie decals for tugboats don’t
exist. I thought about using freight car decals but I was a little bit worried
their size could be quite off, particularly on the wheel house were space is
premium because I shortened it to represent a Harlem River tugboat.
There was
only one option: make my own decals. My printer can’t make white or brass-color
decals. With some creativity, I decided to spray transparent decal sheets with
white and gold paint. Then print black decals on another decal sheet. The next
step was to merge the decals together by applying the black artwork on the coloured
decal. As crazy as it may sound, it worked far better than I thought. Sure, the
decals are a little bit on the thick side (2 films + ink + paint + dullcote)
but far less than the stock Walthers ones.
 |
| Three sheets of decal ready to be merged into a single one. |
Application was easy since the decals lay on flat surface devoid of rivets. Now the model is correctly lettered according to prototype and I can move forward with the project.
The next
big challenge will be to print the white lettering on the hull… the letters are
white on an olive green background. I could use a friends color printer and
apply the decals on a white background like I did with my previous decals. Or I’ll
simply print them black and white, paint by hand the black with olive paint and
merge everything when doing the final weathering (which was particularly heavy
on the hull).
