righidan

Dear friends, Thanks to Massimo courtesy, you can find in his site the latest chapter of the Il-2 saga, this time dedicated to the single prototype with an UTK turret. I hope that it is not only interesting for its subject, but also because it shows one of the first series with a metal fuselage, and the UTK turret. Separated drawings in 1/72 and 1 /48 scale illustrate the turret, and as you know, it is the same turret used in other Russian and lend-lease airplanes, I hope you will enjoy this article. Regards Daniele

Dear friends, The latest number of M-Hobby has just been published, and it contains an article by Prof. Rodionov with the drawings of Mr. Trufanov of the single seater of zavod 18, series 11, recuperated from Lake Ilmen. Three pages that have been published in different sites: https://zeughaus.ru/zhurnal-m-khobbi-2-2024/ and https://www.ozon.ru/product/zhurnal-m-hobbi-2-2024-kollektiv-avtorov-1412334551/ I would like to draw your attention to the side drawings of page 48. There has been a misprint, and I suppose that you too will be able to identify it easily… Regards Daniele

Dear friends, At the address https://massimotessitori.altervista.org/sovietwarplanes/pages/ you can find, thanks to Massimo courtesy, a new pdf about the Il-2 bis prototype. Not only it has a canopy that is completely different from the "normal" two seaters, but it also has a peculiar wing configuration with wooden outer wings, but with metal panels above the weapons. As long as I know, it is the first time that it is illustrated with scale drawings, and if you thought, like me, that it was a rare combination, prof. Rodionov says that in reality it was used by zavod 1 during the whole period of Il-2 production both for normal and arrow-type wings until the middle of 1944. You can find it in the 1942 Il-2 Bis and in the 1944 wreck that has been recovered from Lake Balaton, while from the middle of 1944 zavod 1 produced all-metal arrow-type wings, like the airplane in the Aeronautical Museum Belgrade. I hope that these 37 much-illustrated pages will be useful not only for this prototype, and that you will enjoy them. Regards Daniele

Dear Friends, In September, Massimo added to his site a pdf article on the Il-2 prototypes. After three months of work, a new 47 pages pdf has just been added, dedicated to the Il-2 with the radial M-82 engine, including seven-view drawings in 1/72 and 1/48 scale. This too is based on the drawings of the late Klimov and the photos and text of Prof. Rodionov, with your translator upgrading the drawings. In the last twenty years, much original material has surfaced, and it has been used to make the drawings up to date. It seems to me that this work is more correct than what I have seen published before, but as always, any suggestion, and correction of the possible mistakes is much welcome. Much more material exists, and counting on the patience of Massimo and Rodionov, I hope that other prototype descriptions will surface in due time. Regards Daniele

Daer Friends, Massimo has not been idle, and not only you can find in his site the newest landscape version of all the Il-2 models, but a pdf article on the Il-2 prototypes has just been added. It is based on the drawings of the late Klimov, the photos and text from Prof. Rodionov, and your translator has upgraded and finalized the drawings. As long as I know, it is the most complete study of these samples, and for each prototype, TsKB-55, -57 and -55p, there are seven views in 1/72 and 1/48 scale, derived from the original vector drawings in 1/10 scale. I do also have news that Mr. Trufanov is still involved in producing other excellent drawings based on factory material and recovered and preserved planes. And as there are more Klimov drawings to be finalized, I say that Il-2 lovers are having a good time… Regards Daniele

Dear friends, Massimo has just published the landscape version of the file on the single seaters of zavod 18(7). It is 230 pages long, and as the smaller files about the other single seaters of the zavods with lower production are almost done we should soon have a complete picture. Regards Daniele

Dear friends, If you have the description of the zavod 18(6) single seaters, of more than 100 pages, the good news is that Massimo has just uploaded the revised version. To say revised is a little understatement, as now it has more than 400 landscape numbered pages. You can browse for little gems, like a scale drawing of the KAS-4 cassette for flares, on page 239, a detail often present but overlooked, you can hunt for photographs where they are visible, like on page 252 and 253. This time Massimo has not prepared a new entry, so you must download it from the March 7, 2023: a Research of Ivan Rodionov on single-seater Il-2s built in Factory 18 in 1941 line. Answering some questions about the Il-2 geometry file, I must say that work is in progress to prepare correct scale drawings of the prototypes, but it is impossible to guess a date when they will be ready. When there is a reasonable idea, of course you will know. Regards Daniele

Dear friends, I hope that Flavio has solved his problems, from my part just a few minutes ago, the files downloaded regularly on my PC. There is a surprise, because Massimo has just loaded a file containing information about the Il-2 geometry, including the fuselage sections, which were missing from the excellent Trufanov drawings in MHobby. At the same time, Prof. Rodionov has updated the files on the single seaters, which were originally published in a portrait format. Changing them to a landscape format, to make them uniform with the later variants, he has also updated, and much enlarged, them. So you will have to still exercise some patience, but soon an exhaustive and well detailed description of this airplane will be completed. I want to thank Mr. Linevitch who has used his vast experience to post useful corrections and amendments. I hope that others too will be able to contribute with their observations. Regards Daniele

Dear friends, Massimo has just published an assessment of the Il-2 two-seaters of zavod 1. If then you believe that it is the latest part of prof. Rodionov work, then soon you will be surprised, and I would say pleasantly surprised. About leyreynolds, you are right, and the Mushroom book to which you refer is the same of post n. 5 and n. 6 where MMP is in short for Mushroom Model Publications. Regards Daniele

Dear friends, Good news as Massimo has just published the description of zavod 18(8) two seaters, the famous "arrows". To complete the series, a last work describing the zavod 1 two seaters is near publication. About models, I cannot say anything about 1/48 scale models, as I restrain my perversions to my infancy 1/72 scale. I have compared scans of the fuselage and wings of all the single seaters produced in this scale with Trufanov excellent drawings. The surprising thing is that the main dimensions of the Polish Plastik, of the Czech Smer, of the Russian Ark and of the Korean Academy kits, are all inside reasonable limits. The reason is that probably they all originate from the same drawings, those of Modelist Konstruktor of forty years ago. After a first review, I would not buy again only the Polish kit, as it is clearly a short run with many limits, but I am sure that if you know how to do, even from these sprues you could get a model to be proud of. To analyze the remaining kits will take some time, but now my vegetable garden requires a lot of attention and time, if even this year I have to produce my famous & delicious tomato sauce, the POMAROLA! Regards Daniele

Dear friends, It seems that Warhawk request for much info has been granted! Massimo has just published another of Prof. Rodionov files, this time about the two-seaters of Zavod 18(7). The good news is that it is 483 pages! Please note also that Massimo has found a couple of corrections to make in the previous file, corrections that will be implemented in a future revised version. Any other corrections or addictions are welcome, to make this outstanding work even more complete. Regards Daniele

Dear friends, Massimo has just uploaded 270 pages of a detailed description of the Il-2 two seaters built by zavod 30, the builder of the "etalon" or prototype two seater. Prof. Rodionov has changed the page layout, choosing a landscape format, which allows seeing better the many photos in this work. I know that such an amount of information is impressive and intimidating, but I hope to hear comments and corrections, that will increase our collective knowledge of such an important airplane. Massimo has already noted a couple of points, and I am sure that more comments will follow. Regards Daniele

Dear friends, We have now a description of all single seaters ever produced, because Massimo has uploaded the files describing the single seaters produced by factory 1, 30 and 381 after having uploaded the files for zavod 18. It is a rather interesting situation, because the plants introduced changes not simultaneously, but in the space of a couple of months. Moreover, some characteristics were peculiar to one zavod. For dogsbody, I suppose that this material is analogous to the fine book that Viktor published in 2014 for MMP books, reflecting the knowledge of ten years ago, with some used copies that reach the price of a few hundred euros, with a rather stellar request for 670,99 € for a good used copy! Luckily, I have secured one for the original price of 35€. I feel that the material now presented online is not only free, but also up-to-date. Easter is near, and it is time to reach for our single seaters Il-2 and compare them to all what we know now! Regards Daniele

Dear friends, The second installment of Prof. Rodionov about the single seater of the 18 (7) series is online, and you can find it at the address: https://massimotessitori.altervista.org/sovietwarplanes/pages/il-2/il-2.htm It is a file more than 90 pages long, largely graphical. It completes the description of Zavod 18 single seaters, and in a few days, I hope that the description of the single seaters of factories 1, 30 and 381 will be ready. Enjoy! Regards Daniele

Dear friends, As Jason Nicholas Moore rightly says, the Ilyushin Il-2 is regarded as the Russian equivalent of the Spitfire. In the official Russian documents all the serial planes were called just Il-2, so to describe the differences between the more than 36000 planes produced, several invented subtypes have been used, but now for the first time we have a description of the many differences between all the Il-2 series, starting from 1941 and ending in 1945! The author of this study is Professor Ivan Rodionov, who published a first article with scale drawings from factory material, in the May edition of Modelist Konstructor for the year 1982, and after little more than forty years, published an up to date article in January 2023 in M-Hobby with scale drawings by Trufanov. Now he has prepared the most detailed description that I have ever seen of all the visible differences in the different series produced by the different factories. Thanks to Massimo courtesy, you can find the first part, dedicated to the first single seaters produced by Zavod 18 in 1941, with the serial number 18 6 XX XX. It is 126 pages long, with just about 10% of text, and 90% of images. You can find it in English at the end of the following link: https://massimotessitori.altervista.org/sovietwarplanes/pages/il-2/il-2.htm Other parts will follow, and in a few days the description of the 18 7 XX XX series will be ready. As soon as possible other pages will appear describing the remaining factories and the two seaters. Obviously many things still remain to be clarified, and so corrections and additions are welcome, but I would say that with the information we have now everybody can produce an Il-2 model faithful to the original. Regards Daniele

Gentlemen, Thank you for your kind words. I have always learned many things about Russian WW2 colors from Mr. Kari Lumppio. Now I must say that after knowing of his experience with a real copy of the Albom but with a SD memory card full after eight images, I have also learned that Murphy's Law is a fundamental law of the universe. Regards Daniele

Dear Friends, If you are minimally interested in WWII VVS Colours, you know about the "Альбом накрасок продукции заводов главкраски МХП" alias Albom Nakrasok. It has been studied, discussed, criticized, praised and despised, but few lucky modellers have ever seen it. It is several years that the most relevant pages have appeared in internet, but up to now, I had never seen a complete copy of this book. Luckily recently the RNL has digitized high quality scans of a book preserved to library standards and made them available as zip files. If you want to make your own idea of the album, you can find it on Massimo Tessitori site at the address: https://massimotessitori.altervista.org/sovietwarplanes/pages/translations/translations.html You can find both the original scan and a translation at the above address. As it is my translation, it is a very imperfect one, but enough I hope to understand the text. Regards Daniele

Dear Jason, You are right; he is the same author of the Chronology, which you can access at the address: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/aviaprom/ With it, you can access the latest Version 14 of 10 May 2022, so I believe it is worthwhile to upgrade your older files. I use to keep both the Russian and the Google translated English version, it is such an enormous work, that I use it to look for keywords, and to be sure to have not missed anything, I look for example both for "second coat aerosols" and "аэролаки второго покрытия". To have these version in your PC requires a bit of work, but it is an invaluable research tool. However, the first time I met the name Ivan Rodionov, is a little more than forty years ago, when he published in Modelist Konstructor the best, up to now, scale drawings of… the Il-2! Regards Daniele

Dear Friends, In the magazine M-Hobby has just appeared a milestone article that in my opinion is the most accurate description of a single seat Ilyushin Il-2, with the inclusion of the best scale drawings I have seen in some decades. The authors of the article are Ivan RODIONOV (Moscow) and Sergey TRUFANOV (Rostov-on-Don) with Drawings by Sergey TRUFANOV, with sincerely thanks to Dmitry Klochkov and Boris Osyatinsky. As the magazine is currently very difficult to obtain in Europe, I have posted a couple of the drawings, which have appeared in the site of the publisher and of the distributor, and a pdf in English with the main contents of the article, in Massimo Tessitori site, at the address: https://massimotessitori.altervista.org/sovietwarplanes/board/index.php?topic=2634.msg23854#msg23854 I hope that referring to an external site does not violate any of Britmodeller rules, of course I am doing it as a service to fellow modellers, and as is known Massimo site is devoid of any commercial interest. Best wishes Daniele Righi

Dear friends, As the author of the article on USAAF Olive drab that appeared in Fine Scale Modeler of January 2021, I would try to add some data. First of all if you are happy with your paint, there is no reason to be sad, and second, Mr. Dana Bell has already discovered the essentials of USAAF Olive Drab. While researching Russian WWII colors, I happened to find an article from Wright Field, published in 1946: “Color Stability of Olive Drab Infrared-Reflecting Camouflage Finishes”. It had details for 68 different Olive drab dopes, lacquers and enamels, both as new AND after six months exposure in the Florida sun. It contained chemical formulas, and the exact shade of colors expressed in Munsell notation, that is still used today. So you can reconstruct with a remarkable accuracy the appearance of wartime USAAF Olive Drab. The article confirms the findings of Mr. Dana Bell as the only color studied is No. 41, there is no mention of ANA613, and it is also shown that most of the initial colors were poor matches for color 41 (Bulletin 41). Maybe it can be interesting to note that all the formulas were different, pigment most used was Chrome Yellow, followed by Antimony Sulfide and Red Iron Oxide. The official Color 41 Olive Drab was Munsell 5Y 3.2/2 (RGB: 85, 77, 56; L*a*b*: 32.9, -0.6, 13.4) but of the 22 enamels I studied NO ONE HAD THIS SAME VALUE. The most common, and also median value was Munsell 7.5Y 3.5/2 (RGB: 90, 85, 62; L*a*b*: 36.0, -2.3, 13.9). Most colors degraded when exposed to desert sun for six months, and only a few remained identical. As suggested by Mr. Dana Bell, Infrared reflectance of the finishes did not change to any great extent, even if the color appearance changed. Now we need a good soul to study the Wright Field Technical Documents Library, and try to discover which paint factory used which formula, and which airplane company used it. After all, it comprises only 426 records center boxes for 464.34 Cubic feet… Regards Daniele

Dear friends, As long as I know, the plane in the antiaircraft museum is a restoration of three different airplanes: "Bell P-39 Airacobra is a single-seat mid-engine US WWII fighter. A total of 9,584 Airacobras were produced during the WWII. 4,905 of these were P-39Qs of which 3,291 were delivered to the Soviet Union as a part of the Lend Lease Program. The type has never been in use with the Finnis Air Force, even though the Finns got three war booty ones in fairly good condition. The wings of the 44-3255 that landed in Inkeroinen on June 17th 1944, the fuselage of the 44-2664 found in Aunus and the fin and the rudder from aircraft on the Norwegian fells were assembled together under restoration. Aircraft code: N/A The aircraft is on the show of the Anti-Aircraft Museum at Hyrylä in Tuusula. The aircraft is restored." Maybe other modelers that have the luck of being in Finland, could ask the museum what parts of the airplane are still in their original colors. Regards Daniele

Dear friends, Very informative thread! Mr Barett has given the address of an interesting video, and his observation about standards is absolutely correct: I have found no instance of any aviation colour being rejected on the ground of its appearance, even if the factories produced colours that looked like the standard, and we cannot use any colour we want. I hope that we all agree that AMT4 is not a Granny Smith apple. As Russia had a less advanced production system, and less factories, I suppose that its colours had less variations then the U.S.A., but of course it must be proved studying as many samples as possible. Maybe Mr. Lumppio does not know the colour tolerances, but he certainly knows a lot about Russian colours, and I am sure that if someone uses his matches to paint models, the results will look correct. Finland is a wonderful land, rich with forests, lakes and Russian airplane relics, one of the first places to visit as soon as this epidemic ends. Scarce answer from scalemodels.ru does not means that the information given was not true and interesting. I made a post with material about the Il-2 “Avenger” and I received no answers at al… Vedran shows a photo of Mr. Akan and his three most important weapons: Albom Nakrasok, the etalons of the TU 6-10-1449- and of course Mr. Orlov. A very detailed analysis of the colour 4Bo is no more present on Mr. Akan site, but can be found today at the address http://yarosarmies.blogspot.com/2015/04/4_20.html It is in Russian, but is easily translated with Google, and it shows the two standards that delimitate the colour 4Bo, explains their use and how close they are, and has RGB and L*a*b* values for these colours. Mr Akan described the two colours shown in Massimo post, the lighter as equivalent to his 83063 Protective (faded) Purpose: V. V. S. R. K. A. and USSR Application: 1925-1930s - full painting of auto / Moto / armored vehicles, as well as painting of the upper and side surfaces of most aircraft. The darker hue was described as 83070 3B - Protective, Dark green (faded) Purpose: VV USSR Application: the beginning of the 1930s - 1938 year - full color of the upper and lateral surfaces of aircraft. Mr. Duff is, as usual, right: I see Olive Drab as a green, maybe influenced by the fact that it is classified among green colours in the FS595, but it is actually a yellow, as he shows nicely in his diagram. From the Wright Field study, we have 22 different formulas for USAAF Olive drab. The simplest one is made of Chrome Yellow and Antimony sulfide, a black, plus inert material, but all the formulas are different, and even if they result in an identical colour, you could use any of eleven different pigments, and a few of the formulas did not had a yellow pigment. All the colours were classified in the Munsell notation , explained at minute seven of the video shown by Mr. Barett, as yellows. The official Color 41 Olive Drab Munsell notation was 5Y 3.2/2, and the colours produced by different manufacturers and analyzed at Wright Field were classified as: 7.5Y 3.7/2; 2.5GY 3.8/2; 7.5Y 3.7/2; 7.5Y 3.5/2 ; 7.5Y 3.3/1.5 ; 7.5Y 3.8/2; 7.5Y 3.3/2 ; 7.5Y 3.5/2 ; 7.5Y 3.5/2 ; 7.5Y 3.3/2 ; 7.5Y 3.5/2 ; 7.5Y 3.6/2 ; 7.5Y 3.5/2 ; 7.5Y 3.8/2 ; 7.5Y 3.5/2 ; 7.5Y 3.5/2 ; 7.5Y 3.8/2 ; 7.5Y 3.5/2 ; 7.5Y 3.9/2 ; 7.5Y 3.9/2 ; 7.5Y 3.2/2 ; 7.5Y 3.5/2. So as Mr. Duff said, they are all Yellows, (Y is for yellow) with just one green-yellow. I find airplane colour research fascinating: what you see as a green turns out to be a yellow, you have twenty different factories and their chemists turn out twenty different formulas to represent the same colour, you can have a green without green pigments, or a yellow without yellow pigments. And then there is the proof that Murphy’s law is the main law of the universe. You have just sold your precious soul to the devil, in exchange for a genuine, flawless copy of the original official Color 41 Olive drab, and as soon as you have signed with your blood, you discover that all the USAAF planes were painted with slightly different hues… I suppose that Mr. Barett is right talking about tolerances! Regards Daniele

Dear Friends, Thank you for all the interesting information that is coming out, I think that several lifes will change, and mine for sure About what Massimo says, 34102 is an “easy” color. It is definitely a green, its official name is “dark green”, if it somehow looks brownish, there is something wrong. From the latest 2017 standard, that now is called AMS-STD-595™ REV. A, we have: ID Color Group Specular Gloss CIELAB D65/10 L* a* b* Color Name 34102 Green Flat 38.16 -4.95 12.28 Dark Green In the FED-STD-595C, CHANGE NOTICE 1, July 31, 2008, we had: Color number Illuminant C X Y Z 60° gloss Color Family Color Name Pigment 34102 8.41 9.40 6.92 Green Dark Green 1, 6, 27, 39 It is an abridged table, but it shows the difference in standard used, and also tell us that the pigments used to produce it, are white, blue, yellow and black. Now the problem is that when you use official formulas to calculate L*a*b* from x, y, z, what you get is: 36.7433 / -4.5380 / 13.0933 which is close, but the two colors are distinguishable. What happens when you use a spectrophotometer? We can look at the Picatinny Arsenal Technical Report ARWSE-TR-17001 “SPECTROPHOTOMETER-BASED COLOR MEASUREMENTS” that has measured FS595 samples using a Perkin Elmer Lambda 1050, a laboratory grade instrument that costs like a small car. For 34102 what they have measured is: 38.16 / -7.59 / 13.08, and the problem is that these values are more similar to FS34082 than to FS34102! Comparing the difference of their measured value with the official ones for 200 colors, chosen for a military use, they got the following result: You can clearly see that just one fifth of the measures was perfect (delta up to 1) and that two fifths were visibly wrong (delta from 3 to 9). It means that, even if you use a spectrophotometer, a confirmation of your findings trough comparison to a color chip, is a wise thing. So what Mr. Duff says is very reasonable, and while FS595 is a good choice for contemporary USA colors, the Scandinavian Natural Colour System is much wider in scope, and probably more suited for a general use. Wonderful finding from Mr. Linevitch: the official description of НЦ-5133 is: “Enamel NTs-5133 is used for dyeing fabrics pre-impregnated with NTs-551 varnish, and for painting wooden cladding of aircraft and units.” It sounds like coming directly from the forties! The color chips are really impressive, they come from the RAL "Effect" Range Colour Chart, but are not present in the RAL Classic Colour Chart, that costs much less than the “Effect” RAL E1 Box. About Mr. Lumppio photos, they show that good research is valid in the years. And now, what about scanning an Albom Nakrasok with a spectrophotometer? It would be appropriate for the 21th century! Regards Daniele

Dear friends, Sorry for answering so late, but I have had plumbers working in my house all day long, so I have not been able to study your very interesting posts. We give color for granted, but when you try to standardize it, it is VERY complicated. I believe that to get near the truth we need to use not only standards, but also more than one source of information, among them the study of relics and the reconstruction of the original formulas. It is a well known fact that the colors standard of Fs 595 and RAL changed along the years, and we must use the current standards with caution. From a thread in Massimo site, with information from Mr. Averin and Mr. Lumppio, the modern notation of the following AMT colors is known: AMT-1 = 924, 935 AMT-4 = 741, 760 AMT-6 = 861 AMT-7 = 952, 953 AMT-11 = 820, 823 AMT-12 = 824, 827 AMT-16 = 842, 843. We must note that in the old Russian magazine “War in the air” No. 8 about Il-2 and Il-10, some of these same catalogue numbers are reported. The numbers correspond to the color samples in the TU 6-10-1449-(last two numbers of year of issue) produced by VNIITE, the now defunct All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Technical Aesthetics. The color samples in Mr. Linevitch post show these color samples, and the numbers in the page posted by Mr. Lumpio correspond to the same standard, as he has shown in threads on scalemodels.ru and Massimo site. A page of the colors still produced in Russia, with numbers, can be found at the address https://lakokraska-ya.ru/ral under the RAL samples. Mr. Duff is also right saying that the standard for colors has changed in the years from several points of view. As we have data for these colors from the fifties, and we also have conversion formulas from the older data to the newest, we should be able to convert all these colors to the L*a*b* values used these days with the illuminant and the observer degree we use today. Unluckily, confirming that Murphy’s law is the fundamental law of the universe, these formulas do not work well for typical camouflage colors. I do not want to bore anyone with samples, but using the formulas to change from historical to actual, for a dozen camouflage colors of FS595, only four were reasonably close. Mr. Akan has done a commendable job in producing accurate historical colors, but I suppose that he rightly reserves for himself the information that is crucial for his business. Maybe the "Lakokraska-Ya" company from Yaroslavl can publish the L*a*b* values for the colors it still produces, and maybe in some archives it still has the formulas for the colors produced during wartime. Comparing information from different sources with the spectrophotometric analysis of relic samples, we can reach some reasonable conclusion, and when new data will surface, we can improve our knowledge. And if you are afflicting yourself with the doubt, well, yes, I do own a spectrophotometer… Regards Daniele

Dear friends, The quantity and quality of information from this thread is very high, and I wish to thank Mr. Linevitch for all the material he has produced. Aviation archaeology may be a lesser branch when compared to traditional, but the information we can gather is quite astonishing. Even if as modelers we strive for an exact correspondence of colors, we must remember that in wartime no nation has ever refused an aircraft on reason of its camouflage hue, and so relics like the ones we have been showed give crucial information. Some pieces are so large and well preserved that they could certainly be subjected to a deeper color analysis. Recently I found a Wright Field study of 1946 with an analysis of Olive Drab paints, that included formulas for each of these paints together with Munsell notation, and a short article appeared in the first issue for 2021 of Fine Scale Modeler. I am quite confident that similar information about Russian colors is stored in some Russian archive. Waiting for such data to come out, I think we must be grateful for researchers like Averin, Vaclamov, Orlov, Linevitch, Timin, for all what we know today. Well, and to Google for automatic translation from Russian! Regards Daniele Righi