I just won Tamiya’s P-47D on ebay and I am thinking that is the perfect model to try my hand at a NMF. Everything I have read leads me to the Alclad II line for NMF’s. I see the amazing work you guys do and I was just hoping to get your list of Must have colors from Alclad when doing a NMF. Thank you in advance for all of your help
Airframe Aluminum, regular aluminum, duraluminum, dark aluminum were what I used on my Trumpeter P-47 build. AA for the main base color (don’t forget the gloss black enamel undercoat) to get that polished shiny look, then different shades for the gun panels, control surfaces, and fuselage side rear vent panels.
Really, you can pick any of the various aluminum shades (or even steel or stainless steel) to use on the different panels and control surfaces. The differences are certainly noticable but still fairly subtle. Just as long as you break up the paint job along panel lines, you’ll be happy with the result. Look at pictures from WWII birds, and you’ll see many of them pretty well polished even after a run of hard rides, but the gun panels and panels around the rear fuslage vent doors are almost always noticably different in shade, even in low-rez B&W photos. The removable panels just aft of the cowl rad ring are also usually a different shade in photos.
It’s all personal preference, but I’d recommend a high-shine for the base color coat like Airframe Aluminum. It just looks more like metal, even if you later dirty it up for, say, a pacific bird. Some of the pilots were real sticklers in having their machines clean and fairly polished, though, as they wanted to eek out every last mile per hour of performance. I did Col. Parego’s ‘Slick Chick’, and the blurb on him I found in two different references indicated he always insisted his plane shine, as he insisted it gave him an extra 10 MPH in a dive.
Spend the time prepping your surface (sand and polish till you’re near sick of it), and you’ll be really happy with how it turns out.
Be sure to use a good lacquer based gloss black for your primer like Krylon gloss black. Decant from rattle can and shoot with airbrush. You can find more at my website in the tools and tips section - look for “The Secret Life of Alclad II”
Thank you guys for the help, I am newly back to modeling after a 4 year hiatus and this forum has proven invaluable to me. Also swanny i just was on your website yesterday by chance to do with working with squadron putty. Excellent tutorial on the “Fencing method” I believe you called it!
I recently built an N model Jug as a work in progress thread here. The Gloss black primer is one option, but not absolutely necessary to get a nice realistic NMF. You will find that Alclad’s own Grey primer is great stuff too for this purpose. The thread includes a step-by-step tutorial in there for my method. If your so inclined, check out the link below and scroll down to the bottom of page 1. The final product can be seen later in the thread.
http://cs.finescale.com/fsm/modeling_subjects/f/2/t/151736.aspx
…and your gonna love that Tamiya Jug. In my opinion its the best plastic kit ever made.
Hope this helps,
Joe
I keep on hand “white aluminum”, just plain aluminum, and “polished aluminum” for natural aluminum finishes. I believe a good glossy black undercoat is quite necessary for a polished aluminum effect, maybe less so for natural or “white” aluminum.
It doesn’t need to be gloss black, per se. Just very, very smooth black as a base. I’d recommend sanding with a very fine grit, and then hitting the black with a Dremel packing a cloth polishing wheel (NOT the felt ones!).
This got re-based before NMF, but gives you an idea of the mirror-like smoothness the polishing wheel pulls off:
For my NMF, I prefer to start with Airframe Aluminum. The “high-shine” Alclad finishes are semi-translucent. That’s why they need the black base while the regular Alclads don’t. It also makes them darker than the regular Alclads - excellent for shading.
Next, move on to the regular finishes (unless you want that polished look). I’m a fan of Aluminum, Duraluminum, White and Dark Aluminum. Magnesium and Steel start getting too dark.
The cool thing about using Airframe Aluminum as a base is that - because it’s semi-translucent - the black base makes it darker, so you can modulate coverage of the regular finishes, go with lighter coats over panel lines, etc, and put a lot of variation and shading into the finish straightaway.
Not to start a primer war (you are all better modellers than I) but again a convincing NMF can be achieved without black primer. Of course a good gloss black acrylic is great under the highly polished Aluminum Alclad shade (which I use for my prop hubs and such) but if your going with the used war-weary look, Alclad Grey Primer works great. Use it under the “normal” shades which is designed for this purpose. Here’s my Jug with Alclad over the grey primer. Its done with Duraluminum as the airframe base color and select panels are picked out with regular Aluminum, Dark Aluminum, Semi Matte Aluminum,
…and heres the finished product.
The only part of this plane that received black primer was the prop hub. Remember that once the plane is decaled, washed, decals dullcoated and such, It will reduce the effect the black primer provided in the first place. Good luck in your endeavors…
Joe
I use Future to prime all Alclad NMF. The gloss black just never would dry properly future is perfect
As you can see, there are many, many approaches, techniques, and final results that people like with Alclad. 
To me, that really says something about the paint. It’s awesome stuff, and I hope the hobby market continues to support them enough to keep it coming.
Personally, I don’t think the standard, non-‘high shine’ finishes look right as a base color for any WWII NMF bird. They look great for painted surfaces, like the wings of a P-51, but for truly bare aluminum surfaces the finish needs some reflectivity to look accurate, IMHO. When building my P-47 last year for Doog’s GB I looked at hundreds of pictures of both European and Pacific based P-47s, and even the most weather-worn birds had some shine to them. In Europe where the ground crews where often being pushed to polish the planes they didn’t just have ‘some’ shine to them… you could clearly see distinct reflections in the surface!
I’ll have to see if I can find it again, but I was really struck by one shot I saw of a crewman working on a Pacific P-47. He was dressed only in shorts and the backdrop was tropical, but I don’t remember the exact location. He was crouched on the wing with a tool in hand, working on something behind a small open hatch in the middle of the fuselage, just above the wing root. The fuselage looked beat-up… little dents in it, every rivet head was grimy and/or rusty, and you could clearly see distinct panel lines due to the dirt. You could also clearly make out every feature of the crewman reflected in the fuselage above the open access panel.
That dremel-based cloth effect is really good, and the sad thing is I’ve got a dremel. 
I probably spent 2-3 hours going through the micro-mesh sets up to 9000 grit over the entire model after Surfacer 1200 went down as the main primer and before the black gloss… I really wish I’d thought of using that.
Shininess varies wildly based on the aircraft, theater, unit, location, time of year, operational tempo, facilities etc.
I can pretty easily find shots of P-51s that range from more or less mirror-finish to just about dead-flat. One interesting example is “Petie 2nd” belonging to the 352nd’s CO, John C. Meyer. As a CO’s plane you’d imagine it’d be pretty well cared for. Babied even. But flying high-altitude escort duties and battling the Luftwaffe at high altitude, with temperatures around 40 below and massive beatings from UV, takes a toll.
What’s really interesting about this shot is not that the fuselage is relatively non-reflective (compare it to the painted nose…which does look waxed…or the drop tank), but that the wing (or flaps at the very least) have distinctly more reflectivity.
Here’s another view of the plane that shows similar with the wing’s leading edges.
