Request of Aftermarket Decal Makers

[ziggyfoos]

39 minutes ago, tosouthern66 said:

 I understand the money issue and I agree decal makers need to be able to recoup their investment or they will not be out of business. My deal is if you are going to design decals in one scale and there are kits in other scales give us decals for all the scales.

 

Your first sentence though explains though one reason why they're not in all scales (regardless of kits being available). Another factor is time, not all decals drawn up in one scale can simply by resized by a percentage and then be sent off as-is to the printer. Many have to be resized to fit the kit and the sheet layout themselves have to of course be reorganized. Another is if there are already decals available in that scale, it may not be worth the expense of being redundant in an already limited market.

 

29 minutes ago, tosouthern66 said:

 I would like to be able to build VFA-151 F/A-18E to go with my F/A-18A/C aircraft. There are other squadrons I see I would like to build as well and they are not all in the Hornet type aircraft.

 

That's another issue. Look at how many Hornet squadrons there are/was over the years and each had their own schemes that could vary every year (or less) and between even each Hornet variant - that's a ton of possible schemes to pick. Then of course everyone has their own specific squadron, variant, and time period they want decals of. There's just way too many possibilities out their to satisfy everyone's desire.

Edited April 4, 2017 by ziggyfoos

[Joe Hegedus]

On 4/4/2017 at 10:57 AM, ziggyfoos said:

Anyway, to get somewhat to my point: I've heard similar stories I had for 1/48 A-4s for those wanting A-4 or A-6 (or whatever) sheets in 1/72, I have a stash of Fujimi kits myself of both, but after mediocre sales in 1/32 and again in 1/48 even, I'm now much more reluctant to do 1/72. Others seem to have great success in these scales but personally I can't keep pouring away money and not selling enough even though I really would like to release everything in all three scales.

 

I used to have a large stack of 1/72 Fujimi Scooters, hoping that with the release of the Hasegawa kit in 1/48 that the decal manufacturers would finally put out some new markings and also scale them down.  That never happened, and eventually I gave up waiting and just sold off the kits.  So, if any 1/72 releases DID appear, it didn't matter anymore because I no longer had a "need" for the markings.  A similar, although not quite the same, thing happened when Tamiya released their Skyray kit.  The 1/48 version had a whole slew of new decal releases available almost before the kit was available, but the 1/72 version came and there was NOTHING, until Cutting Edge scaled their 1/48 sheets down some 5 years later.  5 years give or take a bit - by then, the buzz of the new kit is long gone and in many cases not even readily available anymore, the customer has moved on to the next wunderkit to come along, and the manufacturers complain because "1/72 doesn't sell".   

 

Just venting a bit; sometimes it's the customer who lets the manufacturer down, but other times the manufacturer screws himself.

[Joe Hegedus]

On 4/4/2017 at 11:06 AM, MHaz said:

 

While it's been tried before, doing this is rather frowned upon by the printing companies. I know Microscale told me flat out "thou shalt not!" when we tried it one time, and charged me as if they were 2 separate sheets, instead of one larger sheet. When Microscale, Cartograf, etc. look the files over to make sure there won't be any issues with their presses, they see that it's an obvious double release being attempted.

That's odd.   Granted, I have no experience here, but you as a customer are paying them to print a sheet.  Doesn't make sense to me that they would care about that; if they are contracted to print y number of sheets, what difference does it make to them what the customer does with the sheets after they're printed and delivered?  And do they do the same thing if you intend to release a sheet with multiple scales on it?

Not saying that isn't how they do business, as I've never dealt with them and you obviously have, but that sounds really fishy to me.