1/48 Tamiya FW190D-9 White 11 of IV/JG51

Airframes said:

Nicely done Andy.

Click to expand...

I'll drink to that !!

Charles

Hey, thanks guys. I appreciate it. Yesterday and today was spent doing a bit of sanding to fix a few seams that were showing and then I applied this first coat of my version of RLM 76, made with Tamiya paints, 2 parts XF-23 Lt Blue to 1 part White. The XF-23 already has a touch of gray in it to my eye so I did not add any gray. In the close up of the nose area, the exhaust deflector that you can see in front of the supercharger intake is made from card. The piece that was molded in by Tamiya was too thick so off it came. Just below that, now that I look at the close-up, is a seam at the wing root that needs a bit of attention.

Thanks again for following. I think I've settled on a mix for the RLM 82 and 83 colours so may be getting those on tomorrow. Thanks for continuing to follow this build and for your comments.

Looking good!

Looking good sir. I was wondering yours and everyone opinions about RLM 77 ligthgray. I have heard it called a primer ... and seen two examples of it apparently used as camo on Fw 190 A 8 and Bf 109 K4. Do you think this might be the color used sometimes that seems extremely light on uppersurfaces ? Or any info on its use in general?

Looking great buddy!

great job Andy

Great stuff Andy.

Thanks everyone.

Jason, there was some discussion of RLM 77 earlier in this thread (see posts 12 and onward with good input from Steve (Stona)). I'm no expert here (I'm just getting into the late LW colours myself), but Crandall devotes a paragraph to the idea of RLM 77 use as the light gray on some late D-9 camo schemes. He notes evidence of a light gray on a couple of recovered D-9's but also notes that the colour he has seen is different from RLM 77 chips that exist. He also cites Ullmann who, he says, notes that RLM 77 was used mostly as a marking colour for night fighter lettering and that there would not likely have been enough of this colour around to paint camo schemes . He goes on to note that the colour he saw was close to the prewar Hellgrau DKH L 40/52 and suggests there may have been sufficient stocks left over to use.

Looks good so far Andy!

Cheers Hugh.

This afternoon, I masked and painted the "power egg" section with XF-58 Olive Green. The pics of White 11 show this area (assumed to be fabricated separately at the Junkers plant) to be darker than the rest of the fuselage so I'm thinking this was probably RLM 70. But instead of going with a pure RLM 70, I decided to tone this down a bit as it seemed extremely dark at this scale. The rest of the fuselage colours, 82 and 83, will be lighter with the 83 being only slightly different than the nose.

The demarcation line between the engine section and the rest of the fuselage will be sharply defined owing to the different places of manufacture and this is verified by photos, hence the masking. Thanks again for your interest guys.

Thanks Andy i had already read the few blurbs about RLM 77 posted, i was looking for something more like you just replied. Its like the only RLM color i am totally unfamiliar with. Im in the same boat as you so i appreciate your input. Great work and great info for the future... looking forward to your finish , i personally never get tired of FW 190s .

Very Nice Andy!

Coming along nicely Andy.

I will ask about the RLM 77, it is possible that someone has probably RGB color, or reference RAL, FS or any other?. that would help even more.
already if the information is very good, along with a great job, the detail of the padding is great I did not fall in the way of doing

Really neat, Andy.... Well done...

Charles

Thanks guys.

Sergio, I have a reference to RLM 77 as follows:

FS 36492
RGB 229/231/231
C/M/Y/K 8/6/7/0

Oh, and RAL 7035

With no major commitments here at Christmas (family is a 4 hour plane ride away), I got some quality time in and got the basic paint work done. This is my first attempt at late LW colours and, to complicate things, I've been using Tamiya colours which need to be mixed. Wayne was kind enough to send me some recipes but I found I had to modify them to suit my technique, such as it is. Wayne uses a base colour of RLM 76 and covers it with greens in thin coats which allow the base coat to influence the final colour. I tend to make everything opaque so that the colour I mix is essentially the one I get, no matter what I paint it over. I may adjust this over time but that tends to be the way I paint at the moment.

First off, I prepared several colour swatches to get the shades I wanted. I used these to compare directly with Crandall's beautiful profiles in his Dora volumes and then sprayed these on the model. The first pic below was the initial result, which I didn't like as the RLM 82 appeared to "limey" to me.



So, I ended up adjusting the lighter green by mixing in some XF-67 Nato Green and got a result I can live with, although it's still not quite the same as in Crandall's profiles. But then, I even noticed how his colours vary from photos of actual RLM 82 samples and these appear VERY green so I think I struck a satisfactory medium although I do welcome your criticism/comments.




The unevenness of the colours doesn't bother me as this should disappear with the Future and subsequent dull coats. Now, one thing I did pick up on that does not appear in Crandall's profile of this aircraft (although JaPo picked it up) is that it appears there was a tail band that was field-painted over. Take a look at the circled area in this close-up of the photo that Karl posted a few pages back.



I replicated this using my RLM 82 mix and also resprayed the 76 in a slightly different shade, although this is not obvious in the below picture. The fuselage was heavily mottled in 82/83. Oh, and note the plug I added in the jacking hole to replicate that this appears to be blanked off in the real aircraft.



Here's the underside which displays the dark gray leading edge that is evident in one of JaPo's pics. I used something close to RLM 75 for this.



Crandall and, I think, JaPo note that the underside of the engine cowl appears to be a darker colour also but this has me wondering if this might have been yellow as a lot of the power eggs that were prefabricated apparently had yellow panels prepainted. Comments welcome on this. The other thing I will be challenging is that both Crandall and JaPo call up the spinner to be RLM 70 but I'm thinking it's black. If you look back at the photo above and if you believe the prop blades are RLM 70, then to my eye the spinner appears darker. This is even more apparent in the JaPo pic of White 11 from almost head on. Anyone who has access to these pics and can offer an opinion, please do!

Let me know what you think guys as there's still time to modify the scheme. I know there was a wide variation in colours in real life so as long as I'm within the boundaries, such as they are, I'm satisfied.

The next step will be to paint the prop/spinner and then gloss coat everything in preparation for decals. Then I'll apply a dull coat and add the heavy exhaust staining that can be seen to obliterate the lower part if the 11's.

Thanks for looking in and please give don't hesitate to add any costructive feedback.

Looks great so far Andy!

Looks good to me Andy. It's hard to tell from the small size of the photo, but there's certainly different tones at the tail and the lower cowl panel. I think you're probably right about a tail band being overpainted, but I wonder if it could be just 'normal', with the sections coming from different sources, painted slightly differently?
The lower cowling might even be still yellow - it's hard to determine due to angles and lighting.

Thanks Hugh and Terry.

Terry, yes, I suppose it's possible this extension piece might have been painted separately but my theory is, for what it's worth, that the reason the darker colour comes so far down the side is that there might have been a horizontal Gruppe bar that the painter wanted to hide. Here's a bigger, though grainier, version.