The German Lozenge camouflage patterns belong to the most spectacular paint schemes ever used on combat aircraft. Not only the pointillistic ‘blend the colors in the eye of the observer’ approach was innovative but also the concept of printing the camouflage pattern to the fabric instead of painting he airplane. And if you are modeling German late WW I aircraft, its almost impossible to avoid Lozenge ...

The polish company Techmod is known for producing decals for tanks and aircraft of the WW II era. This is Techmod's first attempt on a WW I subject. With the limited availability of Aeromaster and Superscale decals this is a good choice – especially since the decals from other companies like Americal/Gryphon can not be found in central European shops. I worked with Techmod decals before and was pleased with the quality and handling of these decals.

On the first look the decal set seemed to be quite expensive but further inspection revealed that you get not only upper side Lozenge decals but lower side decals as well. With this the decals are priced significantly below their American competitors (which are quite expensive over here).

The decals are packed in a sealed plastic bag which is clamped to a cardboard back (the way which Eduard packs PE-parts). The bag contains one sheet five color upper side Lozenge (12.0 cm by 16.3 cm printed area), one sheet five color lower side Lozenge decal of the same size and an instruction sheet. No rib tapes are provided. So your options are:

1. choose a scheme with lozenge rib tapes
2. make your own rib tapes or
3. use rib tapes from the spares box - as these are provided with Lozenge decal sets from other manufacturers

Unlike most other lozenge sheets the decal doesn’t come in strips matched to the width of the original Lozenge fabric but as one piece. The advantage is, that the application process will be simplified (only 2 or 3 decals instead of 8 or more). The down side is, that you will have to do some careful planning how to cut out the pieces (or you cut the decals to ‘traditional’ strips along the seam lines).

The decals are printed in perfect register. The shapes of the hexagons match the Lozenge decal provided with the Eduard Pfalz D III ‘Profipack’ kit but the colors are slightly different. Since the colors of the Lozenge fabrics are much debated, I restrict my comments on this to my personal impression and so I say ‘It looks good to me’.

Instructions are very sparse. Nothing more than drawings of the fabric with colors indicated in Polish and German (sort of) are provided. So it’s up to the modeler to look for information about the application pattern and the use of rib tape.

Conclusions

The Techmod effort is a nice addition to the existing range of Lozenge decals. On the plus side you have the high printing and decal quality as well as the price. On the minus side there are the sparse instructions and the lack of rib tapes. So I would highly recommend these decals to all modelers who can deal with the rib tape problem and have the necessary application information at hand.

Review copy courtesy of me and my wallet!

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