Rub a Dub

Spent the morning creating Popeye forearms.At least the right arm.

In the paint shop are 10 S scale Canadian grain hoppers, which I'm painting, decaling and weathering for a client.
The client supplied me with dry transfer decals for the cars. They are the only thing available in S for the cars he desired.
Now I really don't care for dry transfers. They're like contact cement. You get one shot to get things in the right place. And if the transfer is a little old the adhesive doesn't grab well onto the model surface. Also, I'm not fond of putting a lot of pressure on the sides and ends of models, continual rubbing can produce some very undesired results in model surfaces.
In this case the transfers were a good 10 years old. Even though sealed in envelopes some of the markings were being cranky about transferring.
My preferred approach in this case is to transfer onto clear decal film and then apply the lettering in the conventional wet slide manner. But it does involve a lot of prep.
The decal sheet has to sprayed with a flat finish to insure that the transfers adhere. Once all the markings are in place the sheet has to be again sprayed, with gloss, to seal and protect. And then the decals can be applied to the model.
So the preparation of 10 sets of decals has actually taken 6 hours of spraying, rubbing and more spraying. My right arm is at this point a little out of sorts. So we rest the arm until tomorrow and then proceed.