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PC10


Nick Millman

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On 12/14/2010 at 12:26 PM, SARowl said:

Nick,

If SE5s of 1917 were PC10, it was definitely brown. On page 144 of 'Sagittarius Rising' Cecil Lewis describes the 56 Sqn SE5s "The Squadron sets out eleven strong on the evening patrol. Eleven chocolate-coloured..."

John

If I can add to this 'from the horse's mouth' so to speak, my Grandfather after serving in the trenches from 1914, was transferred to the RFC on Home defence later in the war fllying (and crashing in!) BE2c, Sopwith Pup (gunnery School) and Camel.
As a kid, I was building my newly released Airfix Camel in the late 1950's, and asked him what colour it should be. He replied 'Brown'.

That one word was the only thing he ever told me about his time in WW1.

 

Just to confuse things though (including myself) I visited the IWM about 20 years ago and took pics of the 2f1 Camel then hanging from the ceiling in the main gallery. It was beautifully lit by sunlight from the building's cupola.

Imagine my surprise when I got prints from my shots (early digital), because from one side, the Camel was quite clearly green, while from the other side was most definitely brown!

I'd guess this different hue depending on light is the cause for the on-going confusion/disagreement on the exact shade of PC10.

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  • 3 months later...

Is Nick still around here?

Fact is, the amount of Ferric Oxide (yellow ochre, gold ochre, orange ochre, red ochre, ....) is crucial in the resulting colour. Frankly, it is a single element that by some variation can achieve either olive green or red brown.
That alone is enough.
Very interesting is the fact the array of French and especially the Belgian "Khaki" colours in the interwar period are very close to the array of PC10 colours... Just mix any ochre you can find with black even with the correct volume ratios et voila ....

 

Last year I still managed to make at least "something" in 1/72, being a Sopwith Camel in Belgian Livery. I decided to use the same mix for Belgian Army 1930-1940 Khaki I use. I have to say, it completely settled in my mind as a PC10.
53701923_2519507724790160_88102891904963

51899516_2455116884562578_21676190345042

51902529_2454985467909053_34032711354695

Edited by Steben
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Similar thing happened to me. I painted an Airfix Camel brown using Humbrol paint. Not sure which, might have been HU113 or whatever the equivalent was about ten years ago, but there is no doubting it is a shade of brown. Photos came out brown but some had a definite green tinge. Could have been the flash but as I've always been a brown PC10 advocate it made me think.

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33 minutes ago, Dave Fleming said:

Humbrol 108 remains my favourite PC10

 

It is becoming a mythological thing on its own being produced anymore etc ... :D 
What colour is it? Do you have pictures? Even those are scarce. Is it close to a known colour?

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2 hours ago, Steben said:

 

It is becoming a mythological thing on its own being produced anymore etc ... :D 
What colour is it? Do you have pictures? Even those are scarce. Is it close to a known colour?

I have several tins of it carefully preserved! It's best described as a browny-olive drab colour. I'll see if I can find something painted in it and take a picture.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 4/11/2021 at 10:34 AM, Steben said:

Is Nick still around here?

Fact is, the amount of Ferric Oxide (yellow ochre, gold ochre, orange ochre, red ochre, ....) is crucial in the resulting colour. Frankly, it is a single element that by some variation can achieve either olive green or red brown.
That alone is enough.
Very interesting is the fact the array of French and especially the Belgian "Khaki" colours in the interwar period are very close to the array of PC10 colours... Just mix any ochre you can find with black even with the correct volume ratios et voila ....

 

Last year I still managed to make at least "something" in 1/72, being a Sopwith Camel in Belgian Livery. I decided to use the same mix for Belgian Army 1930-1940 Khaki I use. I have to say, it completely settled in my mind as a PC10.
53701923_2519507724790160_88102891904963

51899516_2455116884562578_21676190345042

51902529_2454985467909053_34032711354695

I think you've got it!

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In essence any light olive drab with a drop of the right reddish brown or any dark olive drab with a drop of the right orange kan achieve the same.
2 x RAL6003 (olive green)+ 1 x RAL 8027 (current NATO leather brown) is a great mixture for PC10 / Belgian Khaki.
This is 2 x Revell 362 + 1 x Revell 84

But a great variation can be achieved with Vallejo 71.264 Brown Violet "RLM81". Vallejo always gives a scale down effect.

Edited by Steben
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  • 3 weeks later...

So basically, 90 odd years before car manufacturers came up with that weird fad for paint that looks different colours depending on the angle of the light, the RFC were already doing it by accident?

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29 minutes ago, wombat said:

So basically, 90 odd years before car manufacturers came up with that weird fad for paint that looks different colours depending on the angle of the light, the RFC were already doing it by accident?

It's aaaaaaa ... bit different. Today we go from glowy green to bright purple etc. But they definitely did it by accident.
Most paint show bright yellows in direct sunlight because yellowish pigments are usually weak compared to others. OD becomes duller green in shade, dark yellow and sinai grey become grey.
If a paint is thick, semi transparent and glossy, the light gets reflected more, which makes for flash. Lower angles bring out the still lightened pigments. Thin, flat finish paints show that earlier and loose weak pigments earlier in low angle.

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YUUUP........And the light through the clouds, or lack of them. And the view through bloodshot eyes depending on how many beers last night, because Corporal Harvey Baines was too pie eyed this morning to measure the ingredients of todays PC10 batch correctly.  But, in all seriousness, yes. I have photographed present day  painted aircraft at the Shuttleworth Collection in different light conditions and they look totally different. In real life, not just in the shots. The rule of thumb is that if your model PC10  finish looks different in different light conditions, then you are about right. Regards, Pete in RI. 

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8 hours ago, europapete said:

YUUUP........And the light through the clouds, or lack of them. And the view through bloodshot eyes depending on how many beers last night, because Corporal Harvey Baines was too pie eyed this morning to measure the ingredients of todays PC10 batch correctly.  But, in all seriousness, yes. I have photographed present day  painted aircraft at the Shuttleworth Collection in different light conditions and they look totally different. In real life, not just in the shots. The rule of thumb is that if your model PC10  finish looks different in different light conditions, then you are about right. Regards, Pete in RI. 

I've a bit of SE5a fabric from one of the recoverings of the Shuttleworth machine, and that changes colours if you walk out of the house in sunlight, and depending indoors if it's an incandescent bulb or a fluorescent tube. I'm only assuming they followed the old recipe though, someone gave be the fabric so I couldn't ask.  Varies from brown/green to dark brown.

 

Paul.

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Lots of colours change between incandescents, flourescents, LEDs and natural light.  However I did read a work from a WW1 pilot who remarked on distinguishing falling wreckage because German ones were multi-coloured but British ones were chocolate brown.  (I am quite convinced that this was V.M. Yeates on Camels in Winged Victory, but my own copies have been considerably reduced in size from the one I read in the early 60s (a reprint of the original) and I can't find the quote.)  Yeates died shortly after the war so memory should still have been fresh.

 

But the paint will have been applied in the factory paint shops not by bleary-eyed servicemen of any rank! 

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2 minutes ago, Graham Boak said:

 

 

But the paint will have been applied in the factory paint shops not by bleary-eyed servicemen of any rank! 

I don't think many people realise that. Patches to cover bullet holes, yes, but any major re-painting would take place when the machine was returned to an air park for repair etc.

 

The other thing not appreciated is that most aeroplanes where kept under cover, and idle hands were kept out of mischief by giving them a bucket of petrol and a rag and telling them to clean the things. Which of course lead to different weathering than often assumed by modellers.

 

Anyway, my point was only about the difficulties of settling on a modelling colour that has more than a 50:50 chance of being right. I still get a little distressed seeing otherwise lovely models that are painted green, considering that after the war had been in progress for more than a few months the ground in Flanders and surrounds would no longer be anything but churned mud colour.

 

Paul.

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Think of this picture of behaviour of Raw Umber ( a pigment used like daily bread during ww1):
Golden-Fluid-Acrylics-Raw-Umber-TINT-235

"Glaze" means thinned, transparent which brings in a rather "dark earthy" hue. Tint means mixed with highly opaque white.
Glaze makes for yellowish, tint makes for grey.
If you mix paints with weakly opaque pigments/fillers, the paint will be less covering and yellow will come through. If you mix with (modern!) covering white you get greyish result with thinner coat.
This all makes things very fragile and finicky. The cellulose covering during ww2 was thick and had a substantial part of transparent fillers which actually did the main job: protecting the material underneath.
To simulate this in a modern thin coat you actually need to add yellow or if you want to make it arduous you have to make it less opaque and give multiple coats....

Edited by Steben
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Excellent video. The point of my link here lies within the Fe²O³ amount in the mix of "ochre" in the PC10 recipe.
What you see is an analysis of how to mix "raw sienna". One of mixes is adding some burnt sienna to yellow oxide. What actually happens is adding dehydrated Fe²O³ (red ochre) to yellow oxide (bright yellow ochre).
Now what do you think happens if you mix raw sienna with black? A greenish brown (AKA brownish olive drab).
188745690_284785360018662_34258943695474

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