In the past year I obtained several examples of vintage Scale-Craft decals. Even as I initially looked at them I thought some should still be usable, especially the last type that was produced after WWII by Walthers for Scale-Craft.

Also fitting into this story is I got interested to rebuild some cars from the layout of David Sacks. They were not in very good shape, having been stored in an unfavorable location. The original decals were flaking off badly, and this specific car overall looked kind of terrible. In flaking off the decals I could see there was ANOTHER set of decals under the gray paint, the car had been boxcar red originally. It had no proper frame either and the roof ribs were cut down O scale roof ribs I believe.

But again, I decided not to be too aggressive. I put on new wood doors (made from plastic) and a Nason frame on it, cleaned off the old decals and attempted to restore the sides. When painted again it came out looking rather nice in a vintage way, but I had to decide on decals.

This is the finished project. I found a very similar B&M paint scheme on a similar car online, and it came out pretty well.

The decals are from the set seen in the second photo. These were chosen as among the Walthers era sets I have it was in probably the worst shape. The B&M decals all worked fairly well but required a LONG soaking time of close to 15 minutes to let go. The reporting marks also required a long soaking time and half of them fell apart before I could get them on the car. They also required quite a bit of decal setting solution to get them to snuggle down, but they did, as seen in the photos, snuggle down — mostly. Modern decals would have done better, but they came out pretty well all things considered.

I was excited that I could actually use the old set and the car, while not perfect, has a nice vintage look, and a much better vintage look than when it came to me after the years of poor storage.