Thanks friends. Glad you are all in agreement.
Well, things had been going more or less swimmingly on the decals.....
....until.....
...the stripes on the rudder decided to thumb their noses at orderly conduct. The one above on the port side broke into three pieces during the installation, split at some of the ribs, and then reacted badly to the setting solution, leaving wrinkles that are now set in the white band. The one on the other side, which I had installed first, only got a few splits on the ribs. I would have elected to painted these stripes instead if it hadn't been for the "SBD-1" stencil which is printed onto the stripes rather than being a separate decal. So now I'm going to need to do some repairs to the wrinkles and paint touch ups where the decals tore and flaked.
Undaunted (see what I did there?) I decided to not risk using the red band decal on the fuselage with the integral "2-MB-1" lettering below.
What I'll do is cut the numbers and letters away from the red band and use that part of the decal over a painted band. And so it was on to forming the mask for the red band using Tamiya bendy tape.
The red was then sprayed on but before spraying red, I always spray a base coat of white.
With the red painted on, I gloss coated the band before removing the masks and it turned out perfectly with no touch-ups needed:
There's a tiny bit of the white showing on the forward edge but it's hardly noticeable. I'll let this job cure overnight and then move on to placing the codes tomorrow. Thanks again for following along.