Old Estes stickers

*Whew* been away for a while... building rockets and working. And I have a problem. I had the Estes "Venus Probe" in my 2nd childhood stash for about 18 years or more. I just finished it up. it has those pressure sensitive stickers instead of decals. But some of them are lifting on edges & at corners.

Before I foul up hours of good (well, careful at least) work, I thought I'[d see if anyone else has encountered this and what they did about it. CA glue?

I have several rockets from the early 2000s that have stickers peeling on the edges, especially the XPrize kits where some of the stickers are wrapped around the nose cones.

I would be wary of using CA, but if you test it out on one that you don't care as much about and it works okay, then you can do that. What I would suggest is using a tiny bit of clear loctite epoxy applied with the tip of a toothpick. I haven't done this on rockets yet, but I have some stickers applied to a coffee thermos that were peeling up and I did this with great success.

I'm sure there are many adhesives that will work for a short time, and plenty that will work permanently (such as clear epoxy). What I'd do in you shoes, which may not be the best advice as I'm just making this up, is use the most forgiving adhesive I can think of - a glue stick - to hold the stickers while I spray on clearcoat. Then with the clearcoat sealing the stickers' edges, I bet you're good to go.

And here's another thought about the CA: does the sticker sheet include any scrap you can use for a test? I mean, printed, stickable area that's outside the cutout for the part that goes on the rocket. If so, cut some, place it on a test surface, and attempt to seal the edge with thin CA. Make sure it's a printed bit so you can see if the CA affects the ink or dye or whatever. If that works out then it's surly a better edge sealer than clearcoat, and then I'd clearcoat the whole thing anyway.

Ya know... Sign shops have clear films for sealing vinyl graphics. A strip of that applied to the side that's pulling away, then wrapped over the edge of the fin might work.

Thanks, all of you. Unfortunately (and maybe stupidly), I threw the scraps away or I'd have tried jqavins' experiment myself. Hmm. I wonder how deep in the can it is, or did that load go out? Then, too, my neighbor has a sign business, maybe I can check with him. I was going to clear-coat it, so, yes, y'all have provided me a wealth of options. Thanks much!

I was putting decals on the Redstone last night and realized that the whole sheet is a decal, so there is lots of clear areas that I can use. And I mean that stuff is clear, I can't believe the difference from the Olde Days! First crack was a small stripe with the end lifted, I put a small strip of clear decal cutoff over it and it seems to be just fine. This won't work for the big wraps,I don't think, but it's a start.

I've actually scanned self-adhesive decals and re-printed them on waterslide decal paper. I am NOT a fan of self-adhesive decals.

Great idea, but that ship has sailed in my case. The clear decal leftovers have helped. Whose deacl paper do you use?

I build a lot of custom clones, so I bought a bulk pack of decal paper off of ebay. It's cheap stuff, but seems to work well for my purposes. The seller was "the_world_of_papers". Let me know if you can't find them.

Much thanks!