IanW

And with the mottle applied... The 'hole' of 65 on the port side will be filled by the cross, of course. Comments welcome - I'm not convinced by the 71/02 and 74/75 contrast... Cheers, Ian

Just spent an hour shading/weathering the 65... not as obvious on the pics as is in real life... Off now to paint the 74/75 mottle! Cheers, Ian

Hiya, Have spent the last couple of days spraying up my Eduard BF109 E-4... decided on a whim to try and do 1653, the captured Bf109 that ended up in NZ. Have always liked this pic... And also wanted a yellow-nosed BoB Emil, so thought 1653 could fit the bill... am going to assume she had a yellow nose, although the cowling apparently went to make another Bf109, Black 12, airworthy and of course there appears to be no pics of this machine. Anyway, after extensive research (staring at the two photos of 1653!), I decided to go with a scheme of 71/02/65 plus... I noticed the starboard wing seemed to be a darker shade and also there are the reports of the mottle being finished in 2 shades of blue-grey so... I decided to paint the wing outer in 74, and will do the fuselage mottle in 74/75. I'll also do the spinner black, but with the rear ring in 71, as there seems a difference in tone in the pics. I guess I'll go with the white wingtips, unless anyone can convince me of something else... maybe yellow?? And the 65 seems so bright, will tone down a bit with weathering. Any comments/suggestions more than welcome, esp. before I start spraying again tomorrow! Cheers, Ian

Yes, not to get off-topic... but yes, that is a bomb-rack - I was looking through the ORBs the other night and it says that during May, 1944 the squadron's Beaufighters were fitted to carry 2 * 500lb and 2 * 250lb bombs. Cheers, Ian

Hi Ross, Sorry, try this one... http://www.burrowes.org/FamilyTree/E.F.G.B...er-Mustang.html Cheers, Ian

>>In mid-1944 (perhaps anticipating confusion with squadrons moving around for D-Day ?) squadrons returned to two code letters plus an individual aircraft letter. Although Paul Lucas suggests (due to having found correspondence in the PRO) the strike squadrons changed earlier I have not seen anything to support this and many photos of 404 Squadron Beaufighters show the numeral '2' and are dated May 1944. By the time they have D-Day stripes 404 seem to have changed to letters 'EE'.<< Excellant resource, thanks very much. Just to add a bit of detail here to the snip above, which might be relevant... the well-known photo of the 489 Sqn Beaufighter with the Mustang alongside (eg here http://www.burrowes.org/FamilyTree/E.F.G.B...r-Mustang.html) shows that the original squadron codes (1-S) have been over-painted with the new codes of P6 - this implies that the squadron was still using the old 2 letter squadron code at least for a short while after 6 June 1944 (as I believe they were moved to the forward fuselage to avoid over-painting with the invasion stripes) before using 'P6'. Cheers, Ian