Rarely do we seek out the “hard way” to learn something, yet quite often those are the lessons that stay with us. Sweat equity is a real thing.

When I was a younger modeler, I did things quite regularly that were probably not the most effective way to get things accomplished. Rarely did I wait for paint to fully dry. Who had time for that when I was trying to just keep having fun? The tradeoff was that every model was covered in my fingerprints.

And when it came to canopies, most instructions suggested white glue to avoid fogging the clear parts. But white glue took forever to dry. Plastic cement dried much quicker so I could get on with the business at hand. Fogging was simply an unfortunate by-product.

For a while though, decals gave me great trouble. Sometimes they’d stick down nicely, but quite often they curled up as soon as they were dry. And at the time I didn’t know why, so I had to improvise. And for a kid, I came up with a fairly simple solution.

At the time, I started using thinned PVA/white glue. Or as we called it back in the last century in the southern US… Elmer’s Glue. Thinned with water, I’d brush it on the model, stick the decal in place, and after it dried… no more lifting decals.

Of course, being a kid, the glossy halo around all my decals didn’t matter to me. I had seam lines, thumb prints, and Testor’s silver enamel paint that never, ever, ever actually dried. Or cured.

It demonstrates what a grand time it was. It was truly the fun of the hobby that mattered. The result was secondary. We’d show our models to each other, talk about how cool it looked… then go blow it up with firecrackers. Or use it on our plastic soldier battlefields. A few went on the shelf… and sat there until I moved out as a young adult. They went in a box, and eventually in a landfill somewhere.

Fast Forward

Today there are plenty of great decal setting products. And decals are generally better. (Looking at you Hasegawa…) And I’ve learned so much more than I was aware of as a kid. Gloss coats, surface preps, avoiding silvering, getting air bubbles out, setting solutions, sealing it all in… far more than I did in 1978.

And having spent so much of that time doing aircraft, it was really a “school of hard knocks” training ground to become comfortable with decals. Part of me gets why some are intimidated by decals, yet a part of me scratches my head. But like anything else, once you’ve done something enough, it seems easy.

So if you are in that boat of having difficulty with decals, keep working at it. Follow some simple steps, work slowly, give yourself plenty of time, and if the result is not 100%… move on to the next model.

And… watch this video. 😉