[David Dunlop]

In addition to the 11 decals I need to replicate for the front panel restoration of my Supply Unit, I need to replicate two more decals for the front panel of the Coils, Aerial Tuning No. 2A. That sounds and looks like a lot of decals but one can pack a lot of them onto one 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, so I figured I might as well get the work done for all of them at once.

A bit of a trickier challenge for the decals on the front panel of the Coils Assembly. There is a photograph of them on Page 76 of the Operators Manual, but it is an angle shot taken from the upper front left of the Coils Assembly. This makes working with any dimensions off this photo, to establish the factory original measurements of the decals, pretty much impossible, or at the very least, very much beyond my humble means. The first photo in this Post is of this Page 76 image from the 52-Set Manual.

With this project, I have been fortunate enough to have a complete Coils Assembly as part of my Main 52-Set. For whatever reason, when this item was rebuilt in the 1960’s and the new remakes of its two decals applied, the front panel was never revarnished to protect them. Photo 2 attached. The lettering and borders on them are still bright white and the overall paint on the Coils Assembly front panel, bright Gloss Navy Grey.

I also have the remains of a parts Coils Assembly, bearing the same postwar remake decals, but the front panel of it was revarnished. The colouration of the varnish is very evident on both the top of the Gloss Navy Grey panel and the white areas of the two decals, as shown in the third photo. I have not yet had a really close examination of these two pairs of decals, but something about them so far gives me the initial impression they are not traditional water slide transfer decals but probably more modern ‘peel and stick’ type. In any event, I would like to get more factory original looking replacements on my Main Set Coils Assembly.

Earlier this morning, something prompted me to take a look at the front panel of the Sender again. The decals on it are all factory originals in very good shape, once they were carefully cleaned up a few years back. I was thrilled to rediscover a pair of LOCK decals still sitting right under my nose. The LOCK decal originally on the front panel of the Coils, Tuning Assembly from the factory, would have been a match to these two. A very nice rediscovery as I can now calliper the width and height measurements from the Sender LOCK decal for the one on the Coils Assembly. A little bit trickier for the AERIAL TUNING decal. The first half of this decal exists on the Sender; ‘AERIAL’ decal and the other half, ‘TUNING’ covers the same amount of space in characters, so it as well can now be replicated.

The final really interesting thing for me to find with this mornings examination of the Sender decals also relates to these odd, black and white bordered postwar remade Coils Assembly decals.

I can understand from a cost saving perspective the Canadian Army in the 1960’s would spend less money getting simple black, peel and stick decals with plain white lettering, rather than the more expensive production of luminous paint decals, but why the white borders? They simply do not exist anywhere else on the entire 52-Set. Then my eye caught the decals on the Sender. This will show in Photo 4 today but you might have to enlarge the images to see what I mean.

With a water slide transfer decal, it is common for there it be a thin trim strip of clear backing surrounding the entire decal. This is small enough to be of little concern because as soon as the decal is mounted this thin trim strip essentially disappears into the background colour of whatever the decal was just mounted onto. However, with these military decals, once all of them are mounted, a thin coat of varnish was applied to the decals to protect their painted surfaces from getting rubbed, or scratched away. So after a fresh application of decals has been completed, one sees nice crisp colours with clean white characters resulting from the dormant luminous paint sitting there. Then this top coat of varnish starts to yellow and eventually turns the crisp white characters yellow. Now take a look at Photo 4. It seems this yellowing process also shows up on the clear trim tabs surrounding the water slide transfer decals. You can see these yellow borders surrounding every decal in this photograph.

So what I suspect has happened back in the 1960’s is that some company was awarded a contract to replicate the original Coils, Aerial Tuning decals and was given access to an original front panel to establish/confirm the required specifications for the contract. When examining the original two decals, they would have noticed the original white characters had all turned yellow from the aging of the varnish. They probably also saw the same yellowing phenomenon on the trim strip bordering each decal and simply assumed a thin white border strip was present on these two decals and reproduced their interpretation accordingly. I will see what measurements I get from putting the callipers on the original LOCK decal on the Sender when compared to the 1960 remake specifications.


David