Today's task was to complete the AEAF stripes on the underside. I masked these based on known (theoretical) 18" widths with the starting points of the outer portion of the white bands under the wings as per the photo reference on page 1. I also noted that the bomb carriers were left in MSG so I had to mask those off as well. From there it was a just a matter of carefully measuring off the proper spacing and adding the masks. First off, I shot some hairspray along the leading edge to enable some chipping to happen and then I sprayed the white fields. Then I masked for the black bands and shot some Tamiya NATO Black. Both colours were applied in an intentionally patchy manner.
The hairspray didn't work that well and after damping the area down with water several times and going over the areas with a stiff brush, I eventually got the effect I wanted, despite the paint adhering quite well.
It was during painting of the stripes that I noticed that the black undercarriage cover in the reference shot on page 1 (detail produced below) didn't match the spacing of my stripes.
Compare this with the stripes painted on my model for the same wheel:
As you can see, the black stripe on the detail photo is much further down the cover so that the lower edge intersects the point where the straight trailing edge intersects with the curved bit. Also, the stripe is nowhere near wide enough to match the 18" requirement. On top of that , the entire lower portion of the cover appears to have been painted white. If matched exactly, there should be a patch of MSG on the bottom of the cover.
I thought for a second that maybe this Tiffie got a cover from another aircraft, maybe one with the earlier Typhoon recognition stripes but that pattern would have resulted in TWO partial black stripes appearing on the cover, with the bottom edge being black. Looking at the below excellent pic of another 439 Squadron bird we see that the bottom of the cover is also entirely white and the black stripe is higher up, more like what my pattern would indicate. The stripe pattern on the wings of this aircraft matches almost exactly what I painted on my model.
{photo ref:
John Kalen - The Canadian Virtual War Memorial - Veterans Affairs Canada }
My conclusion is that the rapid application of the AEAF stripes resulted in the painters "eyeballing" the undercarriage covers. They certainly would not have jacked up the airframe, retracted the u/c, and painted the covers to match the wing stripes exactly. In doing this, it's possible, if not likely, that they would have got the black stripe in the wrong place and improperly sized in some cases, depending on how artistic the painter was. They also evidently didn't bother with leaving the bit of MSG on the bottom of the cover and just painted the whole thing white.
With all that said, I'm going to apply the black stripe exactly as seen in the photo detail of my bird and paint the entire cover bottom white. I'll do the same on the right side given that there doesn't seem to be a photo of my bird from that side.