Sopwith Dolphin - more work on markings

I've been doing some experimentation with decals. I got some Experts-Choice inkjet decal film recently and I wanted to see what it was like to use. And at first glance it seems like pretty magic stuff. The picture above shows some roundels that I drew up in TurboCAD, and they look great. The last time I tried this sort of thing was about 10 years ago, on my abortive SE5A project, and the decal paper I used then was about an inch thick and didn't actually seem to stick to anything. So I was a bit dubious this time round, but things have obviously moved on in the meantime. I'm pretty impressed.

I can't actually use these roundels of course. The problem is that my printer can't do solid colours very well, as you can see if you enlarge the picture. And I can't use this decal film for the squadron markings either because they're white. But I think it will do the job with the serial number. So I've just had a go at drawing it up in TurboCAD. To do this, I marked out the rectangular background to scale and then just added the text on top. I wasn't quite sure if I would find a suitable font, but it turns out that for characters just over 1mm tall, bold Arial is pretty close, if you use a capital "I" instead of a "1".

Here's a screenshot:

I'm doing the markings in a separate layer, so that I can print them out on their own. But here you see the markings layer superimposed on the layer containing the scanned Windsock drawing. This acts as a sanity check. Another thing you will notice is some cutting guides I've added. These are intended to get round the usual problem with homemade decals, namely the noticeable carrier film. The cutting guides will enable me to cut out an accurate rectangle corresponding the the white box containing the serial number, and this will make the edge of the carrier film less noticeable. So now all I need to do is order some white decal film, because the sheet I've got is transparent. More delays.

As for the roundels, I'm going to carry on with the hollow punch idea. I've calculated that I need an imperial set and a metric set to get the correct diameters (1/4", 10mm, 11mm). One of the sets has arrived, according to a card I've had through my door, and the other is on its way.

So I'm making progress.