Rolls-Royce

Incredible work, @Casey ! A couple of years ago, I did some spectrometric matching of 81, 82, and 76 in the different references I have (Eagle Editions, Merrick and Kiroff, and Ullmann) to the paints I had on hand. These were all acrylics, as at the time I was trying to switch over to them from enamels and lacquers (I live in California, where getting good thinners, etc., can be tough). The closest I found was the now-defunct PollyScale (post-Testors) line, to Merrick and Kiroff. These were all in the mid-4 dE range. I did not attempt any form of mixing as you did. That was a lot of work. I can't imagine what you went through.

But those can be fooled or falsely biased, witness all the "optical illusion" images out there.

Right back at you, Ron!

Looks to me like "B". My guess is that WZ_T's pitot is in the original aluminum underside color, not white. Note also that the underside of the aileron is also aluminum color, not black. This was seen sometimes.

Most impressive, @Casey. The thought of doing all those conversions, even with a computer, makes my head hurt. But your final results absolutely speak for themselves. Well done!

IIRC, pilot's armor (headrest and behind seat) began being added sometime just before Dunkirk. A two blade prop-equipped machine would almost certainly not have had armor plating behind the seat.

The ironic thing is that most of the surviving Spitfires are not really "pretty much as they were built". Due to in-service modifications, metal fatigue, time-change maintenance items, battle damage repairs, etc., almost none are as they rolled off the factory floor. This includes the revered Mk IIa of the BoB Memorial Flight. N3200 and P9374 are probably the closest to wartime factory spec of any flying Spitfires today, although the majority of their parts are new make.

It is a recreation of that aircraft using a few of its original parts that were still airworthy after being recovered from the beach where it had lain buried.

Oh, yeah. More like an anti-SKIN agent. MEK will take your skin right off...

The old Monogram Hurricane kit included the underwing 40mm cannon. You might have an easier time finding those.

In many cases, aluminum showing through chipped paint doesn't look silver, but light gray.

If you have access to Testors' Universal Acrylic Thinner, it works great with PollyScale acrylics, too. I used it a couple of years ago with their RLM 80-series colors on a Tamiya 1/48 Me262.

I haven't gotten that far down this rabbit hole yet. I started with a spectro for use in display calibration and started getting interested in this aspect when checking several different paint manufacturers' acrylic RLM 81 and 82 equivalents against several accepted reference charts (Merrick/Kiroff, Ullmann, and Eagle Editions) a couple of years ago. I'm not that much into the math and/or paint mixes, just finding close matches in off-the-shelf colors. The BabelColor products give me the type of information I'm looking for, and aren't too expensive.

Thanks! Yeah, there's always more than one way to peel a banana...

@Casey it appears by your data fields that you may be using BabelColor's PatchTool or something similar. I just started with that myself in conjunction with their CT&A software and an XRite I1 Pro 2 (and now a Pro 3 Plus).