Graham Boak Posted July 17, 2020 Share Posted July 17, 2020 I think my edit may have overlapped with your posting. Aircraft were not regularly painted in the field by erks, although they may have been in this case.. Aircraft were painted using very specific paint provided by the Air Ministry and coming with very specific names, and "duck egg blue" was not such a name. It does help to distinguish between generic colour names and the actual paints used if we all use initial capitals for the latter eg Sky and leaving lower case for the former. So yes, aircraft were painted at squadron level by local aircraftsmen, and in a colour (or colours) that can be and was termed duck egg blue, or indeed sky blue. They were also painted in Sky (although it has been suggested that what was said on the label need not have been the absolute truth), and apparently a range of other colours. Including Sky Blue and Sky Grey, and something identified as Eau-de-Nil, although this was not a colour available in aircraft-quality paints. Certainly, at least, not Air Ministry issue. You don't help your case by denying established facts in favour of your own romancing. Sky was not named after the event. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies Posted July 17, 2020 Share Posted July 17, 2020 10 minutes ago, Spec7 said: I did and do accept that the guy thinks he is right, thats fine but aircraft were painted in the field by erks and he says they were not. Most Duck egg blue aircraft were painted duck egg blue with cans of duck egg blue paint. You cant get away from that, if they renamed it sky type s later thats a different story, they didn't rename it retrospectively..... Sorry but there are polite discussions and people who add unnecessary digs into post like "i am already starting to tire of this" as if he is speaking to some sort of subordinate.. Anyway it is what it is and i was warned before i joined as many are, the reputation of this site precedes it and thats nothing to do with me...thats the rest of the modelling community that have drawn that conclusion. HAGW 🙂 over and out. I'm sorry if I've given you an impression of perceived superiority. I struggle with patience in all aspects of life - I simply don't have any. I do write using imagery a lot - it goes with my sense of humour. I suppose I've allowed myself to become a bit exasperated here because I am unable to follow your proposition. You talk about (e.g.) modern restorations being different so I try to engage dialogue about factory specs, so you try to show me I'm not Mr Clever Clogs by talking about repairing motorbikes and batch variances at Ford. The different considerations, causes and effects are completely different from production lines to repairs and between in-spec batch variance and just different specs and whenever I (and others) have tried to discuss one aspect which I (or they) do have sound knowledge of, you jump to something unrelated and irrelevant to try to demonstrate your point. Speaking purely for myself, I've absolutely no idea what your point is, although it's quite clear you don't like anyone who disagrees with you. You must either be right an awful lot or dislike an awful lot of people. I've re-written posts several times to try to make sure my language is kind and reacted civilly to your suggestion that I/we are unsufferable armchair rivet counters who don't build anything ourselves. I/we are not and indeed are active builders of varying degree of mediocrity and ambition over ability, but even if we weren't, facts are still facts. Your later posts here are tarring rather a lot of people with quite an insulting brush which I assure you won't attract any animosity from myself, but you're likely to find it a self-fulfilling prophesy generally when writing things that alienates thousands of people at a time. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Edge Posted July 17, 2020 Share Posted July 17, 2020 1 hour ago, Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies said: I'm sorry if I've given you an impression of perceived superiority. I struggle with patience in all aspects of life - I simply don't have any. I do write using imagery a lot - it goes with my sense of humour. I suppose I've allowed myself to become a bit exasperated here because I am unable to follow your proposition. You talk about (e.g.) modern restorations being different so I try to engage dialogue about factory specs, so you try to show me I'm not Mr Clever Clogs by talking about repairing motorbikes and batch variances at Ford. The different considerations, causes and effects are completely different from production lines to repairs and between in-spec batch variance and just different specs and whenever I (and others) have tried to discuss one aspect which I (or they) do have sound knowledge of, you jump to something unrelated and irrelevant to try to demonstrate your point. Speaking purely for myself, I've absolutely no idea what your point is, although it's quite clear you don't like anyone who disagrees with you. You must either be right an awful lot or dislike an awful lot of people. I've re-written posts several times to try to make sure my language is kind and reacted civilly to your suggestion that I/we are unsufferable armchair rivet counters who don't build anything ourselves. I/we are not and indeed are active builders of varying degree of mediocrity and ambition over ability, but even if we weren't, facts are still facts. Your later posts here are tarring rather a lot of people with quite an insulting brush which I assure you won't attract any animosity from myself, but you're likely to find it a self-fulfilling prophesy generally when writing things that alienates thousands of people at a time. Jamie. I think I know how you're feeling here! I have worked in the motor industry (including a good portion of that as a cretin in a dealership!) and can happily testify that there a numerous different shades of any manufacturer's colours - even if they share the same paint code. Some colours have multiple mixes and shade suggestions for the painters to use, but even then it is common practice for a repair to need blending across several adjacent panels. Add in the effects of aging, sun bleaching etc & it's mind boggling how many variations of your Ford red could exist. During manufacturing QC, the team use a spectrometer to assess if the paint on a new vehicle meets their standard range - range being the appropriate word. Hope you don't mind me chipping in (pardon the pun) - otherwise quite happy to be told where to go! Edge 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Giorgio N Posted July 17, 2020 Share Posted July 17, 2020 Politeness is always a rule to follow in any discussion and opinions are always welcome. However opinions and facts do not always agree and in such a case facts should take precedence for the reason that, apart from the inevitable chat over the most diverse things that characterise most discussiom forums, the aim of a thread should be to offer useful information for those modellers that are trying to find that bit of info needed to complete their model or just want to learn something. So let's stick to facts: it's a fact that there was a certain colour named Sky and we know what it was supposed to look like. This was sometime colloquially known with other names, including "duck egg blue" (lower case, it's not an official name) or blue green or others. Whatever name people used to call it, the colour was the same within the variation range allowed by MAP. And yes, there were cases where other colours were used as substitutes, rarely in the field and commonly for aircraft built in the US. We may not know everything about the former but thanks to a number of researchers we know quite a bit about the latter. These are the facts, On top of these anyone is free to have a different opinion on everything, but trying to pass an opnion as a fact without anything to back its validity is IMHO not useful to increasing the knowledge. At the same anyone has the right to believe or not the facts that are brought to light. I mean, there are people out there who believe the Earth is flat, so why worry about a WW2 colour ? Their problem, not mine. I don't care if I may sound like one of the people that other "sources" describe as the BM gang of annoying rivet counters or whatever. I'ts not my case but there's a lot of people here who do research on primary sources and make this research available to others. There's also a lot of people who have turned this research into products available to all modellers and people who have contributed a lot to the hobby as a whole. And if I listen to what they say is because they back their statements with facts, official documents and analyses of real specimen. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spec7 Posted July 17, 2020 Share Posted July 17, 2020 You have unwittingly said everything i said Edge. As for ""although it's quite clear you don't like anyone who disagrees with you. ...from Jamie. "That sort of assumption that was only said to have dig is exactly why we are where we are. Everyone disagrees with everyone else at some point, its got nothing to do with liking people. Again that is something that has been read into this , you could say its your opinion which is fair enough but it doesnt make it right or wrong. Anyway, i know my place as Ronnie Corbett once said to Barker and Clease... Maybe someone will get a moderator to remove my threads and i will leave you all in peace. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Giorgio N Posted July 17, 2020 Share Posted July 17, 2020 21 minutes ago, Edge said: Jamie. I think I know how you're feeling here! I have worked in the motor industry (including a good portion of that as a cretin in a dealership!) and can happily testify that there a numerous different shades of any manufacturer's colours - even if they share the same paint code. Some colours have multiple mixes and shade suggestions for the painters to use, but even then it is common practice for a repair to need blending across several adjacent panels. Add in the effects of aging, sun bleaching etc & it's mind boggling how many variations of your Ford red could exist. During manufacturing QC, the team use a spectrometer to assess if the paint on a new vehicle meets their standard range - range being the appropriate word. Hope you don't mind me chipping in (pardon the pun) - otherwise quite happy to be told where to go! Edge The fact that paint batches may not be 100% identical is well known but must be seen into the correct perspective: even the end users know this and it is for this reason that any time a standard is specified there is a certain level of variation allowed. Sometime this level is even written down very accurately. So yes, we should keep this in mind during discussions on such topics but at the same time the fact that paint can vary depending on the batches and the application method should not be taken as a justification for a "factories used whatever paint" description of what was a different reality. The occurrance of exceptions where quite different paints were used fits within this same problem: it is known that in certain cases aircraft featured schemes that looked very different from what they were supposed to be, think of the infamous "green tan" that appeared on some UK based USAF Phantoms. But again these were exceptions that occurred because of known faults in the supply. The fact that in a certain occasion the USAF bought a paint that reacted very badly does not mean that they always bought bad paint... It is also known that air forces accepted aircraft into service even if painted wrong (Canadian Sea Furies for example), however again these were exceptions that left plenty of traces in official documentation. I see this as the paint industry equivalent of tolerances in structural or mechanical components: if something has to be 1000 mm long, it will never be exactly that, it will be that +/- whatever tolerance is specified. This is well known fact that however can't be used to justify weird claims like one I've read a few years ago about Phantoms varying in length by 6 feet one from the other... tolerances do exist but are well understood and controlled. All the above is valid for historical discussions on the real stuff of course. When it comes to the representation of these same things on a model we have a much wider degree of freedom. Aging of course introduces even more variation, then there's personal taste, scale effect for those who follow this and so on... and these are things that contribute to make our hobby fascinating even for those who don't care much about researching the actual colour schemes 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mike Posted July 17, 2020 Share Posted July 17, 2020 I think everyone needs to take a step back, congratulate themselves on a thread about paint colour being locked down, and come back with clear and calm heads. 4 1 1 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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