Tips collected from ET2SN
Zvezda has a solid hold on armor and tank kits but their submarines stink. For the most part they are basically unbuildable and they even get the scale wrong. I was hoping they had bought some molds from China, but the early unboxing and build videos showed the same basic errors from their Oscar II kit.
Speaking of bollards, you can make your own. Just buy a dress shirt or raid the better half's sewing machine for small shirt pins. File the sides of the heads of the pins so they look kind of like a football, keep the pin part fairly long, then drop into the location hole and glue in place. Eight thousand times easier than plastic parts and much stronger.
Testor's Insignia Red is the right color for modern (US) sub hulls. The real stuff isn't "red lead", at least it wasn't back in the 90's. Its nasty stuff and highly toxic. We weren't allowed in the lower dry dock until a week after they sprayed it, even then you weren't supposed get within 2 feet of it.
What I called a Pearl Harbor Special hull repaint (688s and 637s) was that red on the lower half of the hull and a kind of eggplant/dark purple color on the top half (below the water line). You can get pretty close to the purple if you mix 50/50 insignia red and insignia blue. Pearl had to be aggressive with their hull repaints (anti-biological coating) due to the warm water, boats out of San Diego and Puget Sound could get away with just the red but it really depended on where the hull got repainted and when.
The new stuff, that sure looks like Teflon, is tricky but I just use "NATO Black" and call it a day.
Quote:
Print for Hire Services
https://indycals.net/print/print.html
We are pleased to announce that we are now offering print-for-hire decal printing services. Will will take your Adobe Illustrator file and print water transfer decals. Our service is ideal for cost-effective, low-volume runs.
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He needs the source files in Adobe Illustrator format plus a "CYA" letter stating that you aren't running afoul of copyright laws (if its your source file, don't sweat it).
If you REALLY want to get fancy, and he can handle printing numbers this small, the best font for these numbers is called
Amarillo USAAF. A stencil version of the numbers would be even better, if he can print them that small.
Really off topic, but those numbers have some odd characteristics. Each white portion of the number denotes 6 inches in depth. That means, on a curved hull, that the numbers get taller the closer you get to the center of the deck. The easiest way to see this is to draw a circle and a center line on a sheet of paper then mark off equal distances on the center line and transfer them to the sides of the circle. See how the gaps as measured along the side keep getting bigger?