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Fairey IIIf Floatplane Colors


bjohns5

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I must confess to knowing little about the specifics of colors of 1930s British aircraft in general, and of the Fairey IIIf even less. I'm planning a model of one of the Greek Faireys using Wellsprop's very nice 3D printed kit. From research it appears that the Greek machines were finished in the standard at the time RAF/FAA colors. Some were sold to Greece directly from surplused British stocks. With that in mind, I assume the fabric areas would have been finished in aluminum dope. Would the metal areas have likely been bare polished aluminum, or would they have been painted/anodized the grey tone approximating silver I've seen on some restored aircraft from the period? And on the aluminum dope, "aluminum" in the minds of paint makers covers a range of tones. I have seen Humbrol 56 mentioned as a common model paint to use to represent the color of the dope used. Is that still a good choice? I probably won't use Humbrol but given that as a target I can mix something close enough.

 

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Humbrol 56 is is far too dull and more of a metallic grey, to my mind. Tamiya flat aluminium is better (with a satin topcoat), but can be too grainy. I used to use the old Citadel colour Mithril Silver, with a touch of white added. Looked quite good so long as there was polished aluminium somewhere on the airframe to contrast it with. Another paint I used to use for aluminium doped fabric was Humbrol Metalcote matt aluminium, but the last 5 cans of that I bought never dried (and one hardly had any pigment in it) so I gave up on it. I'm sure someone else can be more helpful.

 

Paul.

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As for Tamiya Xf-16 Flat Aluminum, I recently used some during my first airbrush use.

 

This is from an old 23 ml. jar that I sprayed on my paint mule:

 

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This is from a new 10 ml. jar that I sprayed onto my Airfix 1/72 Hurricane:

 

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The new stuff is perhaps a bit more grainy than the old, but not too bad. As it was the only acrylic aluminum I had and all I could get locally, I used it.

 

I never thought about Citadel paint. I do have an old bottle of Mithiril, but it's gone a bit thick. I did brush paint the lower cockpit of the Hurc with it, after thinning with some distilled water and it looked okay. Since I painted the Hurc, I did buy a bottle of Stormhost Silver ( the new Mithitil replacement colour ) but I haven't used it yet.

 

 

 

Chris

 

 

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I am disinclined to jump into paints for the fabric areas since what works for me doesn't always work for everyone else.  I do like to add a bit of white to the aluminium paint, especially where there are unpainted cowlings and the like, just to provide a bit more contrast between  a finish intended to represent unpainted metal and one intended tp represent doped fabric. 

 

Looking at the one decent broadside photo of a Greek machine which I can find easily seems to indicate that the metal panels seem to have painted in a metallic finish rather than grey (widely used on FAA machines) or left as bare metal. (See p237 of Jarret's Fairey IIIF book for a copy) 

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