Tango Papa is one of several companies that service our hobby and can provide us with a variety of finishing touches for the rockets we spend so much time building and painting. This vendor is a little more diverse as he provides some unique rocket kits, decal paper, Alps Ink and custom waterslide and vinyl graphics. They have a wide variety of waterslide decals spanning many OOP and more popular models in stock.

I had been working on my Tripoli Level 3 project nearly a year, designing, building, researching and creating graphics. It is a Full Scale AMRAAM AIM-120 Missile standing 12 feet tall, 7.5" in diameter and weighing in at around 60lbs dry. I had taken more than one trip to the United States Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, where they display one of nearly every military missile the Air Force has ever used. Many photos and measurements were taken of their AMRAAM on display and I used this info to create an exact scale set of graphic decals and lettering. The position, length, width, spacing and staggering of lettering was all documented, then created by myself and all I had to do was print them. This is where I ran into a problem...

I was nearly out of time for my scheduled cert launch date and needed someone's assistance printing decals from my graphics. I called several decal manufacturers that I found on the web and Tango Papa's phone answered first. I spoke with Tom at Tango Papa Decals and he told me what he could offer and made suggestions regarding the best way to do it. I emailed him my decal files and he took a look and got back to me in about 20 minutes! Unbelievable service for a guy with a large customer base. Needless to say, he understood my timeline, had things moving very fast, gave me target arrival dates and MET those dates using Express Mail by my request. Opening the package though would reveal if it all was worth the wait.

When the decals arrived, they were well protected using cardboard inserts. Upon first view, I could see that it appeared the lettering was exactly to my specs. A Ruler and my dimension charts I had created proved this to be true. He had exactly duplicated what I needed in Vinyl and I was pleased beyond words. The Waterslide decals arrived as predicted one day later and they were absolutely perfect. I could reed the numbers off the screw heads and the lettering on the rear fin gears I had created from Digital photos at the museum. He even included extra copies of screws and graphics of gears, so I would have spares and he filled the sheets up with extras! I was glad he did because I did use a few of during application.

Applying the decals was simple enough and the AMRAAM flew in full colors and graphics for a successful Level 3 attempt, thanks to Tom and company at Tango Papa. People kept coming over to see the rocket and touching the screws, thinking they were real.

Needless to say, I highly recommend Tom and Tango Papa Decals as their assistance, service, support and friendly attitude made it a pleasurable experience. I plan to order from him again and again. If there is something you need and you are in hurry, or just want it done right, Tango Papa can do it for you and get it to you in a flash.