Changes in the livery decals

Hello everyone,

I did not want to comment on this, but I felt myself obligated to clarify some matters with the livery decals.

I am calm person who does not want to have trouble with anybody, I am one of those who think life is hard enough for us to just pile more troubles in our backs. During the last days I had to take the difficult decision to part ways with my decal supplier for several reasons that today lead me to comment.

Some customers complained to me on regards issues with the livery decals that were shipped to them from the printing company in Australia.

Being these issues, broken (damaged due hit on the head print) decals, bandings on dark blue colors (which in the photos that were sent to me, the banding extended to other dark decals).
You would think that these are just two minnor decal issues, (although these are a problem of the printing company, no replacement was offered, but it was me how had to offer it seeing the unacceptable result and thus paying for the company’s fault). The final straw were the responses from my decal supplier which made me feel unsafe and also gave me a feeling of uncertain.
I just simply did not feel safe from the suggestions that were commented.

If faulty decals were shipped to customers, what made me think that this would not happen to me? We are not talking of one set of decals, but bigger and bigger orders for which I had to take the risk of purchase without actually seeing what was being printed and if it was printed as it should.

There are other factors that made me take this decision, but I don’t want to discuss them here as this is not a gossip blog and I don’t think would benefit anyone.

 

However, I did write this entry as my former decal supplier have communicated with me his intention of selling decals on his own with the artworks that I have created and for which I spend many, many hours. He claims this is to compensate the loss of teaching me how to prepare the artworks to be printed on his machine (which in the end, was more profitable as he could focus his time on other customer’s orders since my artworks were ready to print) and to cover the time or materials invested into this project.
To a certain degree, I understand it, but it is still my work what is being printed, therefore I wanted to advice that I do not take any responsability for these decals that he may supply on his own for which artworks I am their creator.

My work did not end only making the artworks, but I also spend a lot of time creating the instructions, creating a website that could make possible shippings from Spain and Australia and I did go through every single country from the Australia Post site in order to match shipping rates/countries on the store. I had to go through troubles finding best shipping methods because it was too tiresome for the printing company to have to write by hand customer addresses on the envelopes (red flag number one, another decision why I opted to purchase the stock myself, red flag 2 faulty decals shipped, red flag 3, decal shipped to a wrong address, although thankfully delivered to customer).

I also did invest in materials to double check these decals are what they are supposed to be, meaning not just purchasing the model kits but also purchasing decal material to test them as every set was tested on a real model and wasting my own ink as well.

There have been hours and hours to make decals to simply fit on the window holes for example, to make sure everything was correct, hours navigating through the net to find the best reference photos to create the most accurate artworks that now he can print and supply on his own from my work. What did I get from his teaching? Well, the printing technology he uses is totally different to the one I would like to use, thus I won’t be using what he specifically taught me for his printing purposes.

I did part ways with him because the results were not what they were supposed to be, period.
I was in my right to cancel this project seeing the issues with his printer and feeling that there was not a clear solution to that, I could not trust half of my business from all what I felt.

I also did what I could to advertise his services in order to promote his business, because so far, he was producing nice decals for me, even after parting ways with the liveries, I still wanted him to print for my own items in order to not to completely leave his services, but unfortunately I won’t be requesting them again after seeing that for him, these orders were just too sporadic, as I order what I needed and with the money I could invest in the early stages of the GSE models.

 

What will happen then? I had to take the decision to go printing on my own. I am sure I will have to face difficulties at the beginning, I will have to do tests but I will know for sure that if something occurs, I will be able to fix it, there is a saying; if you want something done right, do it yourself.

I will also be able to check these decals carefully myself, and ship them in a safer way.

I have purchased the remaining decals from the printing company which I expect to upload on the store only and only if these are totally correct and present no problems.
At the same time I will be doing tests with my own prints and build again an example model, if everything goes as it is supposed to, I will then be able to continue creating new artworks.

 

Although I do understand the printing company’s position, I also hope that mine is understood, if the issues and the uncertainty did not invade my heart, I would have continued using his services, but sometimes you see yourself with no options but to continue on your own.

Best wishes,
Guillem

 

 

747-8F / 747-400F – First work with the nose

Starting to work on the nose for the 747-8F/747-400F cargo detail set. The grey colour is due putty being diluted to create a somewhat texture to the interior. Note that the 16 latches that keep the nose tight on the real aircraft have also been added here.

Floor is still not added as well as some other vertical bars that go across the end of the nose.

I plan to make the flaps of the nose with photo etched.

Painting and decaling guide

Hello,

I have recently finished the guide I was working on alongside the China Airlines A350 build. I truly hope it can be of help, I know most of us modelers know these basic steps, but I tried to give some tips on mistakes and problems I found during the time, so I hope you won’t come accross with them and avoid issues on your model.

Lastly, I would like to comment that  I am working on two new A350 liveries and will upload the profile images in the next week.

Click on below image to download the PDF guide:

Important change on Livery decals

Hello guys,

This post may contradict the previous one, but I think it will be a benefit for everybody interested in the livery decals.

During these last days of reflexion, I have been thinking on the livery decals and the quantities that were sold so far. So I think that it is the correct time to take the decision to order them directly from the printing company (Rob at Wessex Transfers) and make this investment in order to ship them directly from Spain with reduced shipping costs as well as quicker delivery times due geographical location.

Rob does a great job with his printer, and I also wanted to reduce his workload. He will focus entirely on printing instead of carrying customer’s orders as well. So at this point he will have to print and ship the stock directly to me.

This is also another way to ensure everything is correct, as four eyes can see more than two, and those who have ordered from me (Spain) have a reference on delivery times.

It is also good for combined items, for example; if you buy the WiFi radome and a decal sheet, there won’t be two shipments required, although I may just include a small handling fee to cover some of the shipping costs for bringing the decal stock from Australia to Spain.
However, since several decals can be shiped maintaining the same cost, this handling fee will be very small.

The only negative aspect that comes to mind is that the stock may be low as there will be two or four prints from each decal, depending on the stock conditions/selling rate of a determined decal, there will be more or less re stocking of it.

Still, even a decal is out of stock, I would re stock it together with upcoming liveries so that the shipping is profitable.

 

Lastly, I am studying the option of purchasing a module that permits the customer to receive a notification email once an item is back in stock (and the customer registered for it to be notified).
It is something new for me so I will take a look into this and hopefully make the store more complete.

Thank you all for your patience!

Best wishes,
Guillem

About shipping rates

Hello guys,

I am writing this entry since I received some comments on regards the shipping rates and I wanted to give more detailed info on these as well as explain when purchasing simulateneously items under the manufacturer name Rocast Models and Rocast-Digidecals.

Before I forget this, at the moment all the livery decals are out of stock as Rob is in the middle of moving and won’t be able to print/ship those decals for a few weeks, so in the meantime he is establishing in the new place, I will go on designing a few more decal liveries 🙂

The store is set so that Rocast Models items use a specific shipping carrier (shiped from Spain) and the Rocast-Digidecals, that is, the livery decals, use a different carrier (shiped from Australia).

Now some of you may wonder why ship from two different countries, the reason is that Rob, at Wessex Transfers, is the printing company that actually prints and ships the artworks I make.
So you may have noticed that shipping rates increase when ordering both item manufacturers simultaneously, this makes sense as there are two shipments involved.

I want to take this chance and point out that Australia Post prices have a very different range, for instance (and all these I mention are for documents-letters); economy air is as cheap as 2 Euro, naturally this shipping method does not have tracking number. The next in line is Registered post, which does not have much of registered since it also does not offer tracking number although its price is quite reasonable 10,16 Euro, as far as delivery times is about the same as economy from my experience.
That only leaves us with the third and only option if we want tracking number… that is, Express post which costs the quite expensive ammount of about 30 Euro (all the price examples are based on shipments Australia-Spain).

Rob and I spent quite some time thinking which was the best shipping method we could offer, naturally we wanted the cheapest but the safest. During all the period we have been working on the decals, Rob sent me samples to do some tests and in the meantime we calculated shipping times and to be completely honest, the idea of shipping something as important as these decals without any way to follow them through the way, inmediately made us think that we must offer a shipping with a tracking number so that customer can be totally sure to follow his/her order at any time.

Having seen the prices above, which are for letter shipments, we started to take a look at the shipping as parcel. What we found was that their standard shipping did offer tracking number and its price was much cheaper than the 30 Euros of the Letter Express post, Standard shipping costs about 18 Euro.

And so we decided that this one was the best option. Why didn’t we offer the cheapest 2 Euro shipping? Simply because we wanted to avoid the annoyance for the customer not knowing where the decals are and when they would arrive, we would not have that information neither, in the end we did not offer the non-tracking shipments to avoid such problems and because we thought weren’t just right for the customer.

Why not ship all those decals to Spain to offer better shiping rates? Simply because it is an investment I can’t take, I can order let’s say two sets of each livery decal, that is an investment for which I have no warranties will become a loss, as I don’t know for how long will the decals remain on the shelf. We are taking this business with the idea of having an extended catalogue with the time, and thus having physical stock of all the decals would be impossible. I also must take into consideration Rob’s investment in materials and time, that is the reason why we will offer those decals on demand.
Does that mean the decals will always be out of stock? No, decals will always be available but they will just require a maximum preparation time of five days for decal printing/drying/packaging, and that is just being safe, because Rob gives priority to these decals, they are always shiped very quickly.

I want to confirm that we do not shoot the prices up for the shipping rates, I am lucky enough to have the postal office near and can go by foot, but Rob needs to drive there and there are gas expenses as you may understand, but this is included and at a very tiny ammount, in the shipping price.
Chosing the best shipping methods did give us a hard time, but in the end we chose what we thought was right.

 

The decal liveries is a new business under the brand Rocast-Digidecals and Rob and I go 50/50, so the price for the decals is not all what I get or all what Rob gets, but we have to divide, to have profit for the printing service/expensive materials/time and for the long hours I spend designing those artworks.

Printing decals is not as easy as we print a document at home, Rob can spend hours printing a decal set, and sometimes adjustments are needed, so when you hold a piece of decal on your hands, you can think that there have been many hours behind it, from me searching for detail references to Rob fine tuning his printer.

 

Now let’s take a look at these two scenarios:

The WiFi radome was added to the cart, with a shipping cost of 5,30 Euro. If we scroll below, there is only one single carrier “Correos” as this item is shiped from Spain.

Second case scenario:

A livery decal was added, now you can see the shipping price has increased, but not because the decals are made out of stone, but because that is the sum of both shipments, as you can see the two carrier logos, Correos and Australia Post.
If we subtract 5,30 to 24,07 Euros, we will find that the decal shipping cost is 18,77 Euros (this example above is using Spain as guide for the shipping rates).

As a matter of fact, when ordering both items from both manufacturers, the order is splitted into two invoices, and then there you can see the breakdown of the order.

 

I really hope all this makes sense, there were times like when having to chose a proper shipping method, where I thought we weren’t gonna make it… but in the end we chose from heart what we thought was best for the customers, because we did our bests of efforts to make these decals a reality, we also thought to give the best shipping methods available for you.

I hope this explain a bit more about that part of the store and the decals.

Thank you all for your reading time!

Best wishes,
Guillem

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