Decal Day!

Mrs. Woody had a day off and so we went curtain browsing which actually means buying. My argument that our present curtains were a mere 15 years old and had plenty of life left in them went unheeded. I surrendered! We went, we looked and we bought! The only thing is that we have moved from pleated to eyelet curtains, so my task will, at some point yet to be determined by the level of nagging I can endure, be to put new curtain rods up.

Having got over the shock of that escapade I did manage to find solace for an hour with the Scania 143H as I started the process of applying the decals. There are a lot of them as this extract from the instruction sheet shows.

I started with the white lining on the side skirts which was actually eight separate decals. Despite my fears about them breaking or disintegrating things progressed well - for once! There are many different approaches to decal application. Some like to drop the decal and backing paper into water and leave it there for a few minutes to allow the decal to semi separate from the backing paper. The danger with this is the decal completely separates from the backing and you then have to fish it out of the water and try to unravel it as it wraps around itself which is a bit like trying to unravel wet tissue paper. My preferred method is just to dip the decal and backing paper into some water for a few seconds and then just let it sit on the workbench for a few minutes. The decal does separate from the backing and it is altogether a much easier job to then apply it. The photo below shows two of the decals waiting to be applied having been dipped in water.

After an 40 minutes or so the first 8 decals have been applied - just a lot more to go so Decal Day may become Decal Decade with my rate of progress!