German Primer Red and Boxcar Red

Hi all,

This may be of interest to some of us. It may explain the red oxide paint the Third Reich used to primer their AFVs. It is from Rensselaer Model Railroad Society's website, an excellent site with beau coup modeling cross-over resources.

URLs to pix at end.

"Iron is the fourth most common element on earth. A couple of other common elements are oxygen and carbon. Oxygen is very reactive and forms a variety of compounds. It forms several types of oxides with iron, including a yellow color, a red color and a black color. We call these naturally occurring compounds "ores." The principal ore is hematite (derived from the Greek word for blood.) Other ores are limonite (which I think is derived from "lemon") and magnetite, a black ore. Artists know these as the so-called earth colors of ocher, raw and burnt sienna, and raw and burnt umber.
The natural world is basically colored by iron and by chlorine. The chlorine is in chlorophyll, but chlorophyll's nature and purpose is to be unstable and react to sunlight. As soon as plants stop making chlorophyll, the leaves change color. Bricks are reddish brown because of the iron in the clay. Soil is brown from iron pigments. Caucasians are pinkish in hue because their skin, lacking pigmentation and being slightly translucent, is colored by the underlying blood vessels, and of course the blood itself is red because of hemoglobin.

"Box car red is basically burnt sienna, and this pigment has had long use on barns, because it is so cheap...

"With paints being made from earth pigments, the exact shade was not exact, but varied just like the quality of any ore will vary not only from deposit to deposit, but within the deposit. I really doubt that for most railroads up until the time of the Depression, the exact shade of the box car red was ever worried about. A freshly painted car would not match the shade of red on a car in service anyway, because the effects of weathering was so severe, so why fret if the red was slightly browner or redder."*

BTW, elsewhere on the site is an explaination of how black and red oxide became the colors for use on metal. Basically, black and red oxide could be mixed with a carrier that would adhere to iron, whereas other colors were mainly reliant on linseed oils, which do not stick well to metals.

Here is Bovington Tank Museum's Tiger, et al.:

Now for the pix:

primer w/ red bucket

primer rear plate

three primer

primer hull

hull primer

red oxide

StuG III guts

more StuG III guts

*source: Rensselaer Model Railroad Society's website (http://railroad.union.rpi.edu) Guide to Paint Schemes - Boxcar Red

Used with permission

Regards,

Fred

Thanks, Fred...very useful info, indeed...Good work, sir...

Gunny

An excellent write up, and photos.
Thanks for posting.

Fred-- those are some of the coolest photos I have ever seen. What a restoration job! Good going.
DJ