After striping off the old Red paint, and repainting the body sections Matt Black, next up was a wet sanding with Micro Mesh Emerycloth. I started with 6,000, then 8,000, and finished up with 12,000. The surfaces were now smooth enough for decaling as I don't use a clear gloss coat, it's decals right on top of the painted surface.
The kit decals were printed way back in 1991, and were in fairly good physical shape, but the gold color was a pale Yellow, so no matter what they were filed in my circular file. I had bought from Indy Cal's their decal sheet for the JPS Roush Mustang which has it's own slight issue with the Gold color. It's more of a Goldish Bisque, as Mike can't print true Gold nor Silver. But the color does look pretty good, and should work just fine.
The other issue with these decals is that all the gold on every decal is outlined in Matt Black. There's just no way that I can trim away all of the black without damaging the "Gold" color, especially on the long stripes. I've seen these decals used on other builds, and the Matt Black does seem to disappear once a good gloss finish is applied. So that's my plan of attack. You'll easily see the Matt Black trim in the pictures at this stage of the body work. Also as usual, the decal sheet is just one big decal, so I had to cut out each decal separately. And the stripes wasn't the easiest thing for me to accomplish. Also for some strange reason, the decals seems a lot thicker then on past sheets I've used.
My decaling procedure is still Microscale Set under and over the decal, then Microscale Sol, and finally Solvaset. From start to finish it took 16 hours over 5 work days. One of my longer decaling jobs for sure.
And just to make it a little more interesting there are several decals including the side numbers that had to be cut as they spanned across two body sections, and then correctly aligned.
Here's some pictures of the body after the decaling has been completed. just keep in mind that there is no clear gloss as yet.
Joel
