Does anyone know where to get instrument decals for a hypothetical aircraft? Not anything specific. I am building a panel for a Lippisch p13a that was never produced. Just want to spruce up the cockpit a little.
I have found some on ebay. The name might have been Aeroscale but I cannot remember right now. Just look up something like ‘1/48 instrument decals’
Mike Grant Decals has generic instrument panel decals. I received the 1/72 sheet last week. Very nice decals.
I’m betting Compressorman is thinking of Airscale. They have a large number of generic instruments in various scales and era’s. There should be quite a few on-line retailers that carry them now. I have some sets, and they’re fantastic!
I have built up quite a collection by doing google image searches on various instruments. I then rescale them in my graphics program to get them to the right size for the scale I am building. Then I print them on paper. I drill out the plastic panels, and glue the little instrument image behind the panel.
When I search a particular instrument I look for variations and the collection now has several face types for each of several instruments. I only do this for 1:48 and larger. For 1:72 I just put a dot of gloss black paint on the plastic panel because you can’t see much of the instrument face in the small scale.
Hi Don,
I have also printed out some pics of gauges for my 1/32 scale WW1 planes but have not came up with a good way of cutting out a perfect ‘and tiny’ circle.
I use a pin vise and a tiny drill to get a pilot hole in the middle of each instrument. I then follow it up with the correct size for the instrument size. Most aircraft instruments are three inch. Some gyros are bigger, and some of the engine instruments smaller. Still, there are drill sizes that match, and a pin vise gives you good control.
One I have the panel drilled, I scan it. This gives me the layout I need, and I import the scaled image of each instrument and paste it on that layout so that I do not have to glue tiny images of each instrument- I just have one “instruments” image to glue to back of panel. After gluing I put small daubs of transparency cement in each hole to make the cover glass.