Help me! I have a sickness, and it’s commonly known as excessive model building! [;)]
After building 5 P-40s, a Spitfire, and a B-52, one would think I’d take a breather but no, I’m going to embark upon my next two builds, a Tigercat and a Neptune.
So I’m starting the Tigercat tonight, and as I’m perusing the painting instructions (the new Italeri kit that is a rebox of the old ERTL kit sans rubber tires), I notice that certain areas such as the cockpit and the wheel well walls are to be painted green zinc chromate. Ok, no problem. Other areas, such as the gear doors, are to be painted chromate. Is that yellow zinc chromate?
The only references I see don’t show these areas, and of the times I’ve managed to get an up-close look at a real Tigercat, these areas were dark sea blue matching that bird’s exterior paint job. Problem is, I think that may be the way the museum painted it, not the way it would have appeared during the Korean War.
The chromate we worked with at the glue factory, priming aircraft grade aluminum, was yellow. A pale yellow.
If it’s for interior parts, such as the insides of engine nacelles, they it’s yellow zinc chromate.
This is the default type of zinc chromate, though a green version is also availabe. It’s a standard US interior primer colour, and is available in most model paint ranges. If you tell us your preferred paint range(s) I’m sure we can tell you the best match for the colour in those ranges.
Cheers,
Chris.
Aggieman;
From what I have researched the F7F’s interior colors are Int Green for the cockpit, Yellow Zinc for the Radar operators bay, most of the Landing gear wells “ARE GLOSS SEA BLUE” as with the gear struts, wheels, with the exterior colors, the engine nacelle’s are yellow zinc. a good place to get some of the US WWII interior colors is here
http://www.ipmsstockholm.org/magazine/2004/01/stuff_eng_interior_colours_us.htm
this article is an old one but it’s pretty much the new standard for the correct interior colors of the US built aircraft around the WWII era, it’s three parts long and the US Navy section is in part 3, happy reading
While diving off Palau I discovered the wreck of a an F4F in about 40 feet of water. It had hit trees on top of one of the famous “rock islands” and crashed. It shed a wing in the trees and left a debris trail from the shallows of the island into the deep water.
Imagine my surprise that the zinc chromate paint was as new 44 years later as it was when it was painted on.
Note. Ship modelers pay attention to scale of the color. Airplane modelers should too. That is take into account the scale distance of the viewer from the the model and “fade” out or lessen the vividness of the colors to emulate the atmospheric attenuation of the colors to the human eye.