I Dole

The paint application drawings for the Navy Phantoms show they came from the factory in dark grey, not extra dark grey. They look lighter than Buccaneers because they were. At least until service repaint.

Back in the 80s or 90s I went to a talk by an A-10 pilot from Woodbridge/Bentwaters. Someone asked him if it was true that the A-10 had been designed to land with it's wheel up in an emergency. He had never heard that, and thought that if you tried it, the gun muzzle would dig in an flip you over.

I can only help with one of those. Not all Catalinas had retractable landing gear. An A after the designation denoted Amphibious. As in PBY-5A. The PBY-5 was pure seaplane.

Coming along well. Really nice job.

Might be hard to find reference material on that one. It G-AESK appears to have been written off in 1937.

Just putting in my vote; A 1/72 kit of the production Belvedere would be very welcome. I too have the Airfix one, but it's a lot of work to turn it into the HC1

Wandering off topic a bit, but VFR models do an early straight tail C172 in 1/72.

Good grief. I wonder if they ever fired one. It looks like the back end is about to collapse just standing there.

The more I read this thread the more amazed I become. Although I tend not to go above 1/32 scale, the detail in the CAD suggests 1/24 will not be enough to do it justice.

I have used the extreme metals and the Gunze line. They both work really well for bare metal finishes. The Russian aircraft were, I think, painted silver. Like the RAF high speed silver paint. That has a much more uniform finish and a likelihood of going matt. Tamiya LP11 looks like silver paint rather than metal, probably one of the Humbrol silvers too.

Some of the helicopters, the Huey for instance, don't have anything that folds. If you want to ship one in a small space, you have to take the blades off.

I guess efficiency was not the primary manufacturing goal. Zinc Chromate primer is designed to stick well to bare metal and not be easy to get off. That's a lot of clean up work prior to delivery,

Thanks for the reply. That's what I would expect. The one at Bletchley Park must have had the cab repainted for some reason.

I am on the way with the Tamiya Land Rover ambulance. In service pictures seem to be really rare. Most are of restorations. I am trying to find the cab interior colours. Tamiya call for dark green, same as outside. This seems sensible. But, I have seen a picture of a preserved one at Bletchley Park, that has at least the back wall in the same pale greenish colour as inside the back. Anyone out there remember?

I have seen a few pictures of pilots in Vampires with leather helmets, There was a tale from a pilot that converted to the new Sabres and thought it fantastic that they were given hard helmets. They had to duck when opening the electrically operated canopy. If you forgot, the visor could catch on the canopy and try to pull your head off.