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AFV Painting & Weathering
Answers to questions about the right paint scheme or tips for the right effect.
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Olive Drab - THE TRUE Color
JPTRR
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#051
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Posted: Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - 08:03 AM UTC
Olive Drab, THE true color - I'm sure it's out there on one of those machines, somewhere.




I noticed some definite variations of the paint between the sunny side and the shady side. I tried to get some shots when the sun flicked out but that glowing glob was shy.

These are at the 45th Infantry Division Museum. I shot about 500 images of the place the other day and have been putting them on as walkarounds.

I still wonder what the Army was thinking when they selected this very dark OD in the mid-Cold War?
Kevlar06
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Posted: Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - 08:15 AM UTC

Quoted Text

Olive Drab, THE true color - I'm sure it's out there on one of those machines, somewhere.




I noticed some definite variations of the paint between the sunny side and the

shady side. I tried to get some shots when the sun flicked out but that glowing glob was shy.

These are at the 45th Infantry Division Museum. I shot about 500 images of the place the other day and have been putting them on as walkarounds.


Fred-- well-- not quite. I can tell just by looking at the paint that the Deuce and a half, Gamma Goat, and the tanks have been painted with modern water soluable acrylic paints-- because that's the same shade of green and brown we have here at Fort Lewis and Mchord AFB Museums. The reason we're forced to use this paint is its illegal under EPA regulations to repaint using oil based enamels or laquer for outdoor displays. They can be repainted with enamels or lacquers in specialized spray booths, by certified painters, but it's way expensive to send these displays out to have it done. Currently, all the aircraft and a few of the tanks here have been repainted with acrylics, and the OD color is the same sickly shade of pea green.
VR, Russ
JPTRR
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RAILROAD MODELING
#051
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Posted: Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - 08:18 AM UTC
This M4 is next to the building and partially under a tree. Notice the difference between the OD around the plaque and the appearance of the same paint shot from a few feet farther away. No wonder color interpretation is so imprecise.




Now for the same side...


JPTRR
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Posted: Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - 08:21 AM UTC

Quoted Text

Fred-- well-- not quite.


Hi Russ,

Fear not, I haven't lost my mind. I was being facetious. I thought this would be a good example of the perils of trying to ID olive drabs.

Yeah, EPA regulations are a major hurtle to overcome for authentic colors. An acquaintance owns a helicopter refurbishing company and I heard about what it takes to paint things and, bizarrely, how to dispose of unused paint. In short, if there is any left over, it is much cheaper to store the paint than to dispose of it. Far more expensive to get rid of unused paint than to buy it for spraying into the air (through many filters, of course). He was more than happy to donate many gallons of various whites (apparently there are many, many "colors" of white) to mix together to repaint a donated delivery truck of a charity organization.
Kevlar06
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Posted: Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - 08:36 AM UTC
Fred, yes-- I didn't think you were serious. It's just a shame though museums have been forced to use stop-gap paints to depict a vehicle color. I'm sick every time I look at the C-47 and B18 at the Mchord AFB museum. The C47 is painted in D-Day markings and the Bolo is painted green and gray, but they look nothing like thier wartime selves because of the environmentally friendly "pea green" paint. Many of the Fort Lewis museum's vehicles have not been re-painted at all, because it's not cost effective to do, so they are slowly rusting away. The few that have don't have anywhere near thier original color. Future modelers will look at them and take the paint jobs to heart. Frankly, I don't trust any paint job I see in a museum today. There are a few that are trying to get things right-- our Museum of Flight here In Seattle is one, but then again they have access to some great restoration shops at Boeing and in Paul Allen's facility in Everett. The USAF museum does a pretty good job too.
VR, Russ
JPTRR
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Posted: Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - 08:51 AM UTC
Hi Russ,

I talked to a restorer at the Smithsonian's Silver Hill facility about 20 years ago; apparently they do have a way to filter the original color, but it destroys the sample. And on many artifacts, there just isn't enough paint left to destroy. They put out a book about restoring a Focke-Wulf decades ago and discovered it had 3-4 layers of field-applied camo on it. It is fascinating how they did that.

Yeah, I take museum paint with a grain of salt, too. I mainly trust the Air Force Museum but apparently their V2 trailer paint is a flight of fancy. I'd love to visit Museum of Flight. There are some places out there run by people with a passion for the artifacts, who go to incredible lengths to make things as right as possible. I recall the effort that went into restoring Glacier Girl up in Middlesboro back in the 1990s/early 2000s. They spent huge sums of money to have a local machine shop mill fittings to the original specs. Amazing.

Tragic to let artifacts rust away and yet I am thankful that I don't have to decide where to allocate a museum's available money.

Thanks for the insights.
avenue
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Posted: Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - 09:07 AM UTC
I brought tamiya M-40 155mm SPG.include in the box,standard intruction manual.what interest me was the image of M-40.paint look like olive green or "darker' NATO green,it doesnt resemble olvie drab at all.
Kevlar06
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Posted: Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - 12:03 PM UTC

Quoted Text

Hi Russ,

I talked to a restorer at the Smithsonian's Silver Hill facility about 20 years ago; apparently they do have a way to filter the original color, but it destroys the sample. And on many artifacts, there just isn't enough paint left to destroy. They put out a book about restoring a Focke-Wulf decades ago and discovered it had 3-4 layers of field-applied camo on it. It is fascinating how they did that.

Yeah, I take museum paint with a grain of salt, too. I mainly trust the Air Force Museum but apparently their V2 trailer paint is a flight of fancy. I'd love to visit Museum of Flight. There are some places out there run by people with a passion for the artifacts, who go to incredible lengths to make things as right as possible. I recall the effort that went into restoring Glacier Girl up in Middlesboro back in the 1990s/early 2000s. They spent huge sums of money to have a local machine shop mill fittings to the original specs. Amazing.

Tragic to let artifacts rust away and yet I am thankful that I don't have to decide where to allocate a museum's available money.

Thanks for the insights.


What's surprising to me is you can walk into any Lowes or Home Depot with a color chip and they can scan it and mix an exact duplicate color. I suppose it's just too darned expensive to do that with a WWII color chip, and mix up enough to paint a vehicle to be displayed outdoors. If you think about it, most outdoor house paint only lasts about 10-15 years without fading. Here at Mchord they decided they needed to paint all aircraft interiors chromate green just to keep them from weathering-- unfortunately most of the jet aircraft had gray interiors. I don't know about the WP Meillerwagen-- I thought it was restored to original. I know the IWM Meillerwagen has been repainted in UK armor colors. I have the new TAKOM kit, and the callouts for it are feldgelb, grun and rotbrun, but I've never seen any photos of the originals that were camouflaged that way-- so in some cases I think the colors of the real things have been lost to the ages. I think there were also lots of variations in colors anyway, probably as many variations as there were manufacturers.
VR,Russ
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Posted: Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - 12:39 PM UTC
I went to the Smithsonian storage facility around 15 years ago and saw the FW-190 with the layers of paint displayed. The whole point of the exercise was to prove that aircraft were painted with whatever paint was available in whatever time was available. Nothing was neat and tidy with people obsessing over rlm tones and tints and by the book adherence to patterns.

Years later when I started building US aircraft I found the great online articles on US aircraft interiors and discovered that the book said one thing, manufacturers mixed paint to their own individual standards and tints for interror green and chromate primer varied wildly and some makers used aluminum or black primers and so on...

Whatever is available will be used to paint stuff so long as it comes as close to specifications as they let us get away with. So B-26 were supposed to be interior green but were bare aluminum and black! Corsairs wheel wells were not
supposed to be salmon pink. That's the color Vought had on hand.

And sad to say but many German soft skins of non tactical units remained plain dark grey or sand yellow just as they were when they left the factory. There are more important things to do in wartime than obsess over paint.

Like the old US Army saying, "if it moves, salute it. If not, paint it olive drab." Now us that the krylon spray can of dark grayish OD, the latex brown toned OD, or the Rustoleum semi gloss enamel?
RobinNilsson
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Posted: Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - 08:40 PM UTC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=la0-5QFLr14
True Colors ....


/ Robin
Bravo1102
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Posted: Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - 10:24 PM UTC

Quoted Text

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=la0-5QFLr14
True Colors ....


/ Robin

Justin Timberlake? Yeeech. Give me Cyndi Lauper.
RobinNilsson
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Posted: Wednesday, January 25, 2017 - 01:22 AM UTC

Quoted Text


Quoted Text

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=la0-5QFLr14
True Colors ....


/ Robin

Justin Timberlake? Yeeech. Give me Cyndi Lauper.


Agree on Mr Timberlake...
I checked the original version first but I got hooked on the splashes of color which suited the circumstances better, pity they didn't use an OD or other color relevant for armour modelling
wildbill426
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Posted: Wednesday, January 25, 2017 - 01:44 AM UTC
LOL, sooo true.....the one that kills me is helo drab. first time I saw it on a chopper I stood there for about ten minutes trying to describe to MYSELF what color it was. I failed. I still have no clue.
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