Well I have played around with the water slide Decals and yes they work really well except they are subtle decals, you have to catch them in the right light for them to be clear. You cannot see the water slide either. But they are really akin to a watermark and not a clearly legible decal. I have tried using dry transfers but they somehow don't look too clever as they are quite thick. So thoughts moving on. I have access to a sophisticated laser engraver. so my thoughts are to maybe create some IN2 resin sheets as thin as I can get them if at all possible or maybe the Glass Cast resin as I understand this can go down to 1 mm thick (would like it thinner though). Then cut into the resin surface my decals with the laser and then use a heavy pigment in resin to fill the recesses. After curing cut down the sheets and lightly tack the decals to the mould and then infuse with the hope the decals are now embedded in the CF and Resin. Smaller parts I can most likely laser etch into surface and then use a screen print ink, smooth off and then lacquer.



Retired - Thank heavens, and still don't have enough time during the day

I am trying to look at an easy method of applying decals to an aircraft panel. There are lots of them. I did discuss this with Paul the other month but there seems to be no definitive way of doing this. I am currently looking at waterslide and the suggestion was applying this to the mould with a minimum tack before infusion. This could be prone to misalignment in the process. Using. Vinyl stencils seems a problem as the letters need to be small and precise alignment and then will require a silkscreen print to fill the vinyl stencils after removing.
My thoughts are would it be better to create the panel, apply waterslide decals and then use an XCR resin coat to seal them forever in resin. Anyone experience of this and any advice would be appreciated.

Retired - Thank heavens, and still don't have enough time during the day

I am in the process of putting on the final layers of clear coat over the water slide decal.

Nice.

I played around with some waterslide inkjet paper and some clear coat to seal the ink, after rmaddock mentioned about water slide.

It depends on the thickness of the sticker, you can get it as thin as 0.05mm thick, I dare you to find a ridge!!

I clear coated over the top of some stickers for a rc bodyshell once and like Hanaldo said plenty of wet sanding.

What about transfers rather than stickers? They're very thin.

Well most things like that will be done with plenty of wet-sanding to remove that raised edge around the sticker. I'd wager that part has been sprayed 2-3 times.