I am decaling a unit that I custom painted. The decals are flaking off on the nose of the locomotive. I painted gloss coat before applying the decals, and I put solveset on the decals. everything was great until tonight, the decals are flaking off on the nose. How can I correct this from happening again? The decals are from Highball graphics.
After the decals have dried on the model, they should be coated with a clear paint, either gloss of flat. This seals them and blends them into the model.
Bob’s right. It’s best to clear-coat them.
If you haven’t done that yet, you can take Microsol and brush it on to the decal. That will soften the decal and allow you to gently replace it. I use a small, soft paintbrush for this. The brush helps get the decal down into the small features.
After it’s dry, I use a satin finish for my trains. It’s not as shiny-bright as gloss. For structures, I prefer Dul-Cote over decals.
The described situation gives me the impression that the decal never seated/bonded to the painted surface properly to begin with, regardless of the application of Solvaset. Generally, such a failure is due to the paint surface being too rough to allow the clear overcoat to create a truly smooth surface. Similarly, the clearcoat may have been applied too lightly to a rather mediocre quality paint job to provide a good decaling surface. Decaling surfaces need to be very smooth, otherwise problems will always arise. Decal flaking is a sign that the decal is so poorly seated that minute amounts of air have gotten under the decal and left it raised above the model’s surface. Alternately, it might just be possible that the Solvaset was too old, or too diluted, to have done its job propertly, resulting in the same situation as described above but I tend to doubt this.
I would add that although overcoating an applied decal which is showing signs of flaking, using an additional overspray of clearcoat, will essentially attach it to the model, it is not the same thing as having the decal correctly attached to the painted surface in the first place and will often result in the decal’s final appearance being blotchy or obviously raised, since it has not really bonded to the painted surface.
CNJ831
BTW, “peeling”![:O]
I noticed that: bells “peal”; decals “peel”!
Sixty years ago that word eliminated me from a spelling bee! The teacher gave me an example of “I heard the bell peal”; you don’t have to guess how I spelled it. The previous year I had gone completely blank on the word “said”; “said” is not spelled “s.e.d”. I would probably not have had any trouble with a word like “synchronization” but I sure-as-h.e.double hockey sticks didn’t know how to spell the word “said”! This aroused great guffawing among the audience and was humiliation-complete. I have since become, I feel, an accomplished speller but I have made a few spelling blunders here on the forum; occasionally I will have a little fun with misspelled words but, believe me, my intention is not humiliation but rather to inspire the forum member–or forum members–to better spelling. Correctly spelled words make the prose of a response more easily understood.
Which Highball Graphics set was it? Many of his decals are still ALPS printed sets, (he is in the process of converting most of them to silk screen type - like Microscale), the ALPS or KODAK ink used in the laser printing can require quite a bit of persuasion with a damp cotton swab on irregular and curved surfaces and repeated applications of setting solutions, (as many as 20-30 times!). If you can take a picture of the affected area and post it, I might be able to help you salvage the decal.