We are fündekals!  Our aim is to provide you with the most painstakingly researched, most exquisitely produced and printed waterslide decals in the world.  We try to go the extra mile (or 1.62 km to many of you) with our research, often in consultation with noted experts from around the world, to ensure that what we bring you is the absolute most authentic markings you can find for your model.

Our method is generally to toss out literally everything we “know” about a subject and come at it with completely fresh eyes.  We often spend many, many hours on the phone discussing (okay, arguing) back and forth about what’s actually in a historical photograph.  As often as not, what almost everyone who’s ever looked at it has thought they “knew” about it turns out to be incomplete, if not downright wrong.  We access other historical records to back up our conclusions, frequently contradicting what we “knew” to be the “facts” about something.  Call us radicals, but we love to break new ground and rewrite history.  And we’re always happy to be proven wrong, so feel free to pipe up and tell us you think we are and why!  We’re both über geeks about detail and about the history behind our subjects, and we always love to talk about it.

Technically, we try to produce the most accurate artwork that it’s possible for us to produce.  In the vast majority of cases (well north of 99.9%) we do not use computer fonts for our lettering and numbers – each item is individually drawn by hand, with the unique characteristics we see in photos of the real thing.  If there is artwork on both sides of a subject, we don’t simply use the tools available in Adobe Illustrator to mirror image it, because that’s not how it was done in real life.  We use extensive photographic interpretation tools to get the sizes and proportions of markings correct so that the resulting decal will lay on your model precisely the way the markings lay on the real aircraft.  We don’t like “sort of accurate” – we like accurate.

Our decals are printed by the best silkscreen waterslide decal printer in the world, bar none – Cartograf SRL of Bologna, Italy.  Cartograf has been in business for over 50 years, and remains in the hands of the son of one of the two Chiapperino brothers who founded it.  Cartograf, unlike many other silkscreen printers, employs press operators who are true artisans, some of whom have been with the company since its inception.  Cartograf uses proprietary processes and equipment that allow them to print much finer items (scale 1” high broken stencils in 1/72 for example) that other printers are simply unable to reliably print.  They use the latest computer color matching processes, always backed up by the human eye to ensure precision.

A couple of housekeeping notes:  both of us have “real” jobs and family responsibilities that compete for our time.  We do our very best to get orders processed and in the mail to you as quickly as humanly possible, but sometimes there may be a slight delay of a day or two.  We ask your patience, and please rest assured we are working on things as fast as we can possibly go.  If you don’t hear anything from us in a reasonable amount of time, please contact us via the contact link on the site.  Also, please note that given the current state of the world, mail deliveries are frequently delayed, sometimes for ridiculous amounts of time – which is completely outside our control.  But if a package does go astray, we will do our best to make it right for you.  Please do not initiate a PayPal dispute until you’ve communicated with us and allowed us the opportunity to investigate and see if we can fix the problem.  Likewise, if a decal is sub-par and has somehow slipped past Cartograf’s and our quality checks (rare, but it does happen), we will make it right for you.  Our goal is your complete satisfaction.

If you’re new to fündekals, welcome!  If you already know about us, welcome to our new and vastly improved web site.  We hope you’ll find lots of things you like, and that you will enjoy using them.  And as ever, have fun!  We welcome your product ideas, so please feel free to contact us via the link at left