Decals - handling slightly larger decals

[ChrisSteadman]

It has been a little stressful this morning, as I put the Techmod decals onto my 1/72 PZL P-23. I don't do a lot of decalling (or modelling) and my experience has been limited to kit decals, mostly armour, and mostly those that come with kits, mostly older kits as well.

What took me by surprise this morning was that the clear carrier film came away from the backing paper long before the coloured parts of the decal. With smaller codes this wasn't a problem, I just treated each letter/number separately. The under-wing codes, being c.18mm tall, were more of a problem. The clear film departed first, which caused structural problems to the individual '0', '8', and 'N'. Then as the coloured parts started to come free they began to split up, even before I had touched them. So, I had 3 or 4 parts for each, that needed carefully manoeuvring around and lining up on the model. Is this normal? I soaked in warm water for about 45 secs, then brought the decals out of the water and let them rest for another minute or so. Any advice would be very welcome and gratefully received. I have some very nice kits that I want to build (e.g. ICM Po-2) that have some quite large decals.

TIA

Chris