Blog Update #009 – New Stuff

What’s Happenin’

As I’m sitting here, contemplating writing this, it kinda occurred to me – I suppose it’d be neat to have some insight or at the very least some heads up of what has been finished for decal designs as of late, wouldn’t it be? Despite the long down time and having literally a dead computer stalling the whole ordeal out even longer, I didn’t sit idle.

So far, the outlook is by the end of June, business is back to normal. Orders can be taken, commissions will finally get printed and the designing will continue forever. I mean, I know every time I say “yes by then it’s back on!”, life lifts its foot to deliver the swift disabling kick to the nether region of progress, but generally that’s the current outlook. Brexit still sits on the horizon, albeit in October and the pound vs euro is slowly stabilizing a tiny bit so printing isn’t quite as expensive as it grew to be around March but… it’s still up there.

One of the things I had to do in the mean time was raise the prices some, now it’s somewhere around 17.50$ on average per set(though of course they differ on so many things, but that’s for most of them), and I hate to say it will get more expensive as the company I use, well, gets more expensive to use. Regardless, I’m trying to kick up whatever the hell I can to meet the higher prices quality-wise; for instance one tiny bit of a little extra will now be default: license plates and dashboard dials printed on high quality photo paper(as well as on the waterslide decal paper, so you get both). Like, when I say high quality, I mean four out of five star tier Canon photo paper. The 20 bucks per damn pack type. I think this is worthwhile down the line for two reasons, one is that I can print on a far higher resolution than the decal printers so whatever isn’t waterslide, I can crank out prints at 1200DPI which is… plenty sharp. The photo paper is also thin enough to allow the dash decals to be fitted easily, akin to those of Best Model Car Parts. Yet they’re thick enough to mimic license plates well enough. That’s effectively step 1 of 2 to justify the price raise, step 2 is a bit further down the line but it’s one I really wanna do.

Step 2 is metal transfers. Effectively little chrome foil stickers that are pre-cut in any shape, say emblem backings, scripts, so forth. I’m trying to save up for a Silhouette Cameo to do so, which I was fairly on top of ’til my PC decided to die and needed replacing. It’s one of those things one can combine really well with decals, as emblems get both the embossed photo etch look as well as the smallest details on top, not to mention I’m told many modelers love these things. They’re fairly easy to make, fairly easy to cut and even easier to finance, so it’s something I can definitely do when the payment hurdle is overcome.

Whats New

As for what’s new, I figure I might as well do this from now on to give a little insight, and y’know, so people don’t have to guess when visiting this website. Before my PC was tired of being functional, I’d been hard at work doing just about every single Mustang from the early seventies through the modern ones and I’ll be honest, I’ve made some fairly good progress on that.

I had started on the ’79 Mustang Pace Car before the PC died on me, but prior to that I did do most of the Fox bodies with only give or take seven planned sets to go. The ones still left on the list are the ’79 Mustang Pace Car, obviously, the ’83 Mustang GT, the ’85 Mustang Predator GT302H & GT302R, the ’89 Mustang LX CFD-25, the ’92 Mustang Shelby AAC Mk1 and the ’93 Mustang SVT Cobra R. Which will all get done when the laptop is set and ready for my work.

1979 Mustang Cobra, 1980 Mustang Cobra, 1984 Mustang GT350 20th Anniversary, 1985 Mustang Dominator GT, 1985 Mustang GT, 1985 Mustang GT Twister II and the 1985 Mustang Predator GT302.

I did struggle like a crazy person on the ’79 and ’80 Cobras, I can tell you that for free. I literally, no joke, made the entire hood cobra from scratch using some warped ass photographs. There’s hardly, if not any clear pictures of them both, hell for the ’80 I used three different angled shots of the front and overlaid them with one really low resolution one and sweated for like 7 hours while my damn PC kept crashing, forcing me to go back to this snapshot file that had me losing like 15 min of work every single time. But I got there in the end. Those Mustang sets are mostly designed for the MPC kits, with exception of the 1989 onwards ones, which are for the ’90 Mustang LX and ’93 Mustang Cobra kits respectfully, but even then I can re-shape them to match any kit if needed, just holler at me. I do quite enjoy doing those hyper rare and supremely specific dealership specials, they’re fun to do and you learn a fair bit of niche automotive history while you’re at it!

Other than that I finally managed to get my grip onto a revered 1970 Cutlass kit by Jo-Han, the genuine oroginal release and not the Testors re-release which has the wrong interior. What this meant was that at last I could do the proper 1970 Cutlass 442 stripes, redesign the ’70 Cutlass Rallye 350 set to be up to my newer standards and lay down the foundation work for the ’70 Cutlass 442 W-29 stripe set that I’m inevitably going to do.

1970 Cutlass 442 and the 1970 Cutlass Rallye 350.

As for some other miscellaneous sets I did lately, one of ’em is the AMC Spirit AMX from 1980, a pal of mine inspired me to do just about every AMC set through the seventies just to give our old fallen rival of the Big Three some love, not to mention there are some extremely rare kits out there like the Hornet and whatnot that could still use a decal set. I’ve got the ’71 Hornet SC/360, ’74 Hornet X, ’78 Hornet AMX, so forth. Aside from that, the 1970 Ford Torino and 1970 Mercury Cyclone are getting love as well, the ’70 through ’74 Torinos and the ’70 and ’71 Cyclones will have all of their respective sets like the Torino King Cobra, Cyclone Spoiler II, Torino Sport, and such.

1970 Ford Torino Cobra “Twister”, 1970 Ford Torino Cobra(Laser Stripes), 1970 Ford Torino Type N/W and the 1980 AMC Spirit AMX

Oh and one last thing, I’m desperately looking for that damn MPC Dodge D100 kit which is about as rare as can be these days either cause of hoarders or underproduction, either way I just cannot for the life of me get one – however I did do some work based on the Lil’ Red Express kit to eventually fit to the D100, this aughta get some folks excited.

And that’s about it for this update, like I said I’ll be doing this more frequently to have some info on whats new!