I got the markings from John today, very quickly in fact. I spent about 3 hours carefully reading and applying them. I think they turned out very nicely. I sent this list of minor issues I found to John. Nothing was a showstopper.
A couple of issues I noted:
1)The Decal that goes on top behind the canopy to hide the seam with the star tracker, the yellow stripe with red stripe is way too wide to line up with the yellow/red line that is on the main cone wrap and the color is off. I cut it off and cut a piece of the yellow stripe with red stripe from the test sheet you included to hide the small misalignment of the line. John said that he did it this way on purpose and it isn't supposed to match, but I preferred my solution.
2)Aligning the front nose piece, I had to basically align one of the blue tapered side marking on one piece and then wrap from there, if I tried to align the front nose piece edge with the seam, the blue side markings did not line up.
3)I did have just a bit of wrinkling on the rear where the cone goes from taper to straight, John's instructions note this may be an issue and suggested trimming on a pre-marked line, and I trimmed that small indicated portion off and used one of the included yellow trim lines to hide the seam between that and the rear cone wrap, not a problem, worked as intended.
4)It should be noted the vinyl markings are way too thick to allow putting the pods on the fins, the vinyl needs to be trimmed away for them to fit, I know normally there aren't pods on this version.
5)I used rail buttons and had already marked and cut their locations, in the decals, they have a large white cutout on the blue bottom for the launch lugs to be placed, it might be good to include a cover decal, like a hatch or something to cover those up in case people don't use launch lugs, they are large and you can't hide them with the little things he includes, I used a couple of vinyl hatch decals on white that I had from a Pegasus kit I used to make that I covered them up with.
6)Last point, the instructions indicated it was a good idea to fill the nose cone lines and then paint it silver or grey, but when you trim the wrap there is large portion of the canopy section that was not covered at and silver looked terrible against the white. I didn't want to try to mask or brush paint the canopy white, so I used some very thin white vinyl from stickershock that conforms down into the lines etc with minor hair dryer heat so I did that for a base of white, and then applied the window markings and the rest. I don't think that the lines needed to be filled, I don't notice anything show through, I would paint the cone gloss white.
John did note that I got the front nozzle decal that hides the seam backwards, I didn't notice the other nozzles on the sides till I finished it. I also apparently reversed the rear cone wrap, although since the writing is right side up, you don't really notice it.
I'll have to get some of the poly spray and finish it up this week.
Frank
I purchased his NASA skin off of eBay so, go there and search for it. Also, John is a member on this forum and I think he sells his skins to members for 50% off. Here's the post...
