Quite some adventurous evening today.
Since I was able to remove the cowling, I thought that it would be less difficult to get the decal on.
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1. cowling removed and decal ready to be applied
Having seen and taken lots of pictures from Sally B a couple of years ago, I noticed that the checkered pattern should cover the entire frontside till the edge of where the cowling flaps are.
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1. Checkered pattern goes al lthe way toward the cowling flaps.
I thought that these flaps would be a good reference point to align the decal with. Unfortunately this turned out to be impossible. The decal is way too small to cover the entire surface of the cowling. Therefore aligning with the flaps would cause the front of the cowling to have no decal.
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1. Couple of millimeters short
Therefore I chose to align the decal with the front of the cowling. Clearly showing that the decal is a coupe of millimeters short. The wrinkles I dealt with using Revell decal softener and it improved already after a first round.
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1. Aligned at the front and first round of decal softener used
If the decal would have been large enough, the front 'triangle' pieces would have fit nicely and should have overlapped each other, but now that I had to compensate, open areas remained which I had to deal with as well. Another round of softener was applied as well.
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1. Open areas to deal with
2. new round of softener, looks smoother already
The open areas at the front of the cowling were painted black, resulting in not equal dimensioned yellow and black squares. After another round of softener, this is how the cowling looks currently.
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1. A little short but for the rest not too bad, from a distance.
From a large distance it looks quite ok, but when looking closely and comparing with the original Sally B, it is far from perfect. Nevertheless, I think removing it and trying to paint it will not be an improvement, so will leave it like it is. Hopefully the people looking at it will not notice it.
