DECAL SHEET REVIEW

Fündekals U. S. National Insignia Standard - Gray
1:72 Scale

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Following its entry into WWII, U.S. national insignia designs began to change rapidly. Beginning on 28 June 1943, American aircraft carried a national insignia in the “star-and-bars” configuration with a red border. The idea was to make identifying friendly aircraft easier at greater distances, but it was found that that the overall shape of the star and bars were more important than its colors, and there were continued concerns about confusion in the heat of battle caused by having red in the insignia, given the color of Japanese aircraft insignia. So the red outline was officially deleted on 14 August 1943. The follow-on markings carried an insignia blue border that served as the standard national insignia until early 1947. Some low visibility versions of the markings (e.g, nightfighters) had the bright white replaced with a medium grey.

This decal sheet by Fündekals provides comprehensive treatment of the greyed-out design. It includes the 15”, 20”, 25”, 30”, 35”, 40”, 45”, 50”, 55”, 60”, 65”, and 70” versions of these markings. There are enough of each size to cover at least two complete models. These insignias are designed precisely using the published specifications from 1943. Unfortunately, the insignia decals in a lot of model kits, and even a few aftermarket decal sheets, fail to conform to the specification. Here, Fündekals appears to get it right.

The quality of decal design by Fündekals is excellent and the printing quality is right up there with Cartograf and other leaders in the decal business. Colors are vibrant (at least as much as they can be for this subdued set of insignias), crisp, in perfect register, and carrier film is very restrained.

Fündekals is a lower-cost but high-quality decal manufacturer who typically does a print run of a subject and then moves on. As with all Fündekals products, the markings guide is available as a PDF file that can be conveniently downloaded from their website. Here’s the link for the instructions: http://www.fundekals.com/starsBars72.html

Many thanks to Jonathan Strickland and Fündekals for the review sample. You can find and purchase this and other Fündekals sheets on the web at: http://www.fundekals.com/

Haagen Klaus
Scale Modeling News & Reviews Editor
Detail & Scale