Rolls-Royce

If you have a photo of your subject, look for a triangle at the top of the aerial mast pointing back toward the rudder. If there is one, the aircraft had the HF radio, and would have used the wire strung between the mast and fin. Neither the triangle nor aerial wire was present when a VHF radio system was installed.

Not mats, but free-handed, IMHO. Take a look at the differences in the Dark Green pattern over the exhausts.

Probably not. DuPont has done many different things over the decades. They are a chemical company first and foremost and their current website says nothing about producing paints. They likely sold that business long ago. Dana Bell is the person whom I feel would be most likely to possess samples of US aircraft paints from the 1930s... EDIT: Paints formerly sold as DuPont Performance Coatings have been produced by Axalta Coating Systems, since the division was sold off in 2013 .

I'd suggest that the OP contact @Dana Bell.

Mostly due to age, methinks, and wear on whatever protective coating had been applied to the magnesium at the time of manufacture. There were no new wheels in the supply system as the USAF was then engaged in phasing out the F-4 in favor of the F-16, and I don't think anyone had anticipated such an attrition rate that late in the aircraft's service life. There were similar shortages on the F-16 when I was in Korea in the mid-80s, but then it was because certain parts were failing unexpectedly and all such new parts were at the time going to the production line.

There was a lot of cross-pollination between the British and German aviation industries between the wars. And they both used NACA reports from the US. Funny you mention corrosion and magnesium. Back in the 80s or 90s, the USAF was running short of mainwheels for its F-4 fleet. The magnesium elements of the wheels in use and in reserve were corroding and the wheels were becoming unserviceable. The service was looking for a vendor to manufacture more wheels, but in the meantime, instead of receiving a built-up wheel and tire at the tire shop when doing a change, the old tire was dismounted. The wheel was then inspected for serviceability, and if it was good, a new tire was mounted and balanced before reissue back to flightline maintenance. A 30-minute process became an hour or more.

https://www.scalemates.com/products/product.php?id=947506&p=inthebox https://www.scalemates.com/products/product.php?id=993485&p=inthebox Don't know if these are specifically what you're looking for, but you might be able to cut-and-paste to get what you want. And there are others listed.

The answer is "probably not". The Eduard Mk Is come only with the pilot hand pump for landing gear extension and retraction, but the Mk II had the engine-driven hydraulics along with a somewhat different cockpit sidewall arrangement. I suppose you could purchase and install their Brassin Mk II cockpit. The handful of Mk I cannon-armed Spitfires also didn't have the true later "b" wing, being armed only with the two Hispano guns and no Browning MGs. There are probably other detail differences I haven't covered. I do have "The Few" kit but it's currently buried in my stash, so I can't verify whether it has the Mk II's Coffman starter bulge on one of the sprues at the moment. Edit: No Coffman bulge on the sprues that I can see.

Honestly, Jerry, that's probably something you wouldn't want to use on a small-scale model. The pigments in house and general-purpose paints aren't ground fine enough and the resulting paint would probably either cover up too much detail used un-thinned, or wouldn't cover well when thinned. For use on a 1:1 replica like those Spitfires built for the movie "Battle of Britain"? No worries. But on our stuff? I think it's a no-go. OTOH, if you are just looking for a reference, Nick Millman's .pdf on Ministry of Aircraft Production colours is excellent, is readily available for purchase directly from him, and has spectrographic measurements in Munsell notation as well as suggested FS595 matches from original MAP reference chips. He can be contacted at his blog www.aviationofjapan.com.

I believe you'd probably encounter the same issue that Jamie has when trying to recreate paints from back in the day - materials have changed, either through falling out of favor due to cost/scarcity, or through legislation (such as chrome yellow, lead, and others). Artists also generally create their colors "on the fly" before putting brush to canvas, so I think that would increase the difficulty of such a task exponentially. The people who do art restoration are intimately familiar with this, as shown on a number of videos on YouTube.

The crew tasked with finding the true colors and doing the repaint seem rather sure. The video shows a microscopic exam of paint layers dating from 1802 onwards on chips taken from Victory's hull. His ships were repainted on his order prior to Trafalgar in 1805 because he disliked the black and yellow prescribed by the Admiralty from 1770 or thereabouts.

I believe I read that description in John Keegan's The Price of Admiralty, written several decades ago, perhaps even before Victory was painted with the yellow. Here's a Historic Dockyard video on the repaint: These guys are serious about accuracy!

I'd read that the colors of RN ships in Nelson's time were described as "Black and Buff", and the tannish shade in the center wide-angle photo seems to fit that description better than the yellow.

From what I've read, Nick doesn't pop in here much anymore. This is his blogsite. You might want to contact him directly: http://www.aviationofjapan.com/

I have to agree, what with its larger eyes, round head, and shorter wings...

Alamy.com has this profile:

Ah, one is not MAP interior gray green, but RLM 02....

Daniel, the little display panel built into the meter shows D65 and 10 degrees regardless of what the app is set to, so I suspect those are the built-in specs for illuminant and observer. The others are likely just mathematical transforms. And I hear you on the price. If I hadn't already bought my XRite years ago for display calibration, I'd be looking, too. As I've already said, to my mind the fact that Jamie uses a Nix Pro for measurement when he doesn't have his high-priced rig available speaks volumes for its abilities. Nobby's also reads close to what my XRite does. I would definitely be thinking about that one if I already didn't have a capable meter and could swing the cost.

Update: I did finally get the free Android app up and running on my phone. The problem seemed to lie in registering the app with my email address at gmail. Once I entered another address, it was able to complete the verification and registration routines just fine. The app does allow you to change certain parameters for measurements such as illuminant and degree of view, so I intend to go back and revisit how the sensor and its readings stack up against the higher-priced spread once those things have been set to match.

After revisiting this, I've come to the conclusion that I really can't recommend the Vinckolor sensor without reservations. Not only do its readings vary - sometimes a good deal - from those of my I1 Pro 2 (even after careful review and setup of my CT&A software), but I cannot get the suggested ColorSpec Android app to work on either my Samsung phone or Fire tablet. Very frustrating. EDIT: @Troy Smith please take note! Having said this, I do feel it would be useful as a comparator if one had a standard such as the RAF Museum book at hand. Although its absolute accuracy when compared to another higher quality meter isn't great, making it "iffy" for standalone measurements (if you wanted to check a sample against a published set of L*a*b* numbers, for instance), its repeatability appears to be good. So if you have a physical standard to hand (the RAFM's MAP chip chart, or one of the recognized Luftwaffe references such as Ullmann or Merrick & Kiroff, for example) to do back-to-back readings with a paint sample, it seems to work very well since you're only checking it against itself. Another thing this meter does when making comparisons between two colors is to tell you in what ways the second reading varies from the first: "more black", "less red", "more blue", etc. I think this might be handy for those of you who want to mix your own colors ("colours" for those of you across the Pond) from craft or miniatures paints.

Well, initial comparison tests between my XRite I1 Pro 2 and the Vinckolor sensor have been a bit disheartening. For instance, readings of the RAFM book paint chips in Dark Earth, Dark Green, and Sky were roughly in the ballpark at dEs of 1.98, 2.24, and 2.05 respectively, but Azure Blue was much farther off at a dE of over 4. More specifically, the sRGB patch of Azure Blue rendered from the Vinckolor's L*a*b* reading lost the distinctive violet/purple tinge the actual chip has, becoming a clear blue. I suppose that's to be expected, but I was hoping for a better match between them. I am still looking through the Help files on my spectroscopy program to make sure I don't have something like the illuminant improperly set for the Vinckolor's data fields. I can do direct readings from my XRite into the program, but the L*a*b* numbers reported by the Vinckolor have to be entered manually, since its input isn't directly accepted. More to follow...

Nice looking Canberra!

Amazon also sells the VINCKOLOR sensor, which works with a Bluetooth app and also gives direct L*a*b* readouts on its own front panel. It uses an included white tile for self calibration. In the item description it's called a spectrophotometer, and if the specs for repeatability and inter-instrument agreement are correct, they aren't bad. I figured it might be worth the $44.99 asking price, so I ordered one. I'll keep you all posted. EDIT: I should have it sometime tomorrow afternoon. After it's fully charged, rest assured I'll be going through the RAF Museum book's color chips, checking its readings against those from my XRite I1 Pro spectrophotometers. Stay tuned!

From what I've seen of that one, it's mostly aimed at people matching colors to established commercial paint libraries, and not so handy for the type of thing we'd be doing with it. Much like the Datacolor Spyder of a couple of decades ago, which had a basic model, and a "Pro" model. They were the exact same meter, but the Pro software could give you xyY coordinates for any color onscreen as well as monitor profiles. Speaking of which, Datacolor makes the ColorReader EZ, which appears to be in the same vein as the Mini 2.

There is a more affordable alternative to a spectrophotometer, the Nix Pro 2 color sensor. While at USD 350 brand new, it isn't exactly cheap, it is still much less than any brand new spectro, and doesn't require connection to a computer to operate. Jamie has mentioned using one when his spectro isn't at hand, and if it's good enough for him... Another member here, @Nobby Clarke, has recently purchased one. His measurements of a particular paint chip in his RAFM book using the Nix and mine of the same chip in my copy using an XRite I1 Pro 2 were extremely close (I don't have the exact numbers at hand), making the Nix a reasonable alternative in my book.