How can they build such great kits and have such CRAP decals. Trying to get the invasion stripes on these kits is almost impossible!
Will
Hi, Will, I’d forget the decals and just mask and paint my own. I think it’s easier than dealing with decals for the stripes.
And I agree, it’s such a nice kit, as is their P-51B.
Best regards,
Brad
Its not just Tamiya, most kit decals stripes and such don’t fit. It normally is easier (and looks better) when they are painted.
Forget the invasion stripe decals - even the good ones will never match painted stripes. And the P-51’s relatively easy, too, since it’s pretty slab-sided. Worst thing I’ve ever tried to mask stripes on is a Wildcat. Stupid tapering barrel of a plane. As for the Tamiya decals, the “limited edition” Mustangs have Catrograf-printed markings. So the P-51D 9th Air Force, P-51B Blue-Nose and so on.
It’s better to paint invasion stripes, I don’t like the stripes (and don’t really like decals) anyway but they were in most cases applied in a rush, and they’re never really perfect lines,I have a few pic’s were you can see this really well.
Offcourse, white can be a terrible colour to paint, with brush or airbrush
Here you can see that the white comes over the edge of the wing while the black stripes don’t.
After a while they became really dirty too.
With regards, Ninetalis.
Can’t recall the last kit that I used the decals from the box.
Stripes…decals that cover a whole surface like the verticals stab of jets…they all pretty much suck. I try to avoid them if possible.
A general rule I follow is never use a decal for something you can paint. Invasion stripes are not hard to mask and paint and look much better than any decal could.
True, but this can be a problem when tail codes and squadron markings are printed within a large colored tail decal. Sure, you can cut them out, but that’s more busy work and all that. I agree that painting the stripes would look better. And in the end Im thinking it would have been a lot less work than making the decals work. I did one of those very same P-51s.
Same here. Tamiya and Academy are especially notorious for bad decals.
Recently I’ve been building 1/72 WWII Italian fighters, and I saw that some makers included decals for the camo patterns, like the “spinach” pattern decals in Airfix’ Fiat G50, and that aftermarket makers made sheets as well, like sheets of the smoke ring camo. I can’t see laying down a decal that large, with the issues that can occur with decals, when it’s not too big a job to mask and paint those markings. Even to do the lozenge patterns on WWI German aircraft, I understand how much of a labor- and time-saver it is to have sheets–masking those patterns would be nigh on impossible–but I still wonder how the sheets go on and how prone to trouble they might be. I guess it’s the same with any decals, of course–there are good ones and bad ones, but it seems like the likelihood of problems increases with sheets like those.