British hi-vis orange/red?

[Weaver]

Well I now have tins of Hu.19, Hu.174 and Hu.132, so investigations shall commence shortly. Based off the tin tops, I'd say Hu.174 looks pretty keen.

JCF: I've seen some of the early pics of the Twotters and they were definately in a lighter, more yellowish shade at some point. However there are also pics showing BAS, FIDS (Falkland Island Dependencies Survey (old name for BAS)) and FIGAS (Falkland Islands Government Air Service) aircraft in Signal Red going back to the '50s too.

This all stems from the S&M British Antarctic Aviation 1/72nd decal sheet that I picked up at Bolton. It covers the following, all of which are Signal Red unless stated:

FIGAS
Norseman on floats
DHC Beavers on floats and wheels (blue stripe)
Bell UH-1H Huey (captured in '82. The sheet says it was a UH-1D but on-line sources seem to concur that it was in fact a UH-1H)
BN Islander (white with brown and red stripes)

FIDS/BAS
DHC Beaver on wheels with RAF roundels
DHC Otters on wheels with RAF roundels
PC-6 Turbo Porter
DHC Twin Otter

I'm using the Twotter decals to do a Skyvan for the Non-military GB on BTS. Other ideas:

1. Use the FIGAS Norseman or Beaver decals on a Supermarine Sea Otter, acquired as war surplus in the early 1950s. The Blue stripes from the Beavers might even fit on it's cowling. Given that BAS later used DHC Otters, this would add a nice lvel of confusion.....

2. Use the BAS Otter decals on a Do.28 Skyservant.

3. I've actually got a rare injection-moulded PC-6 kit, so the BAS marking would be an ideal real-world scheme for it.

4. The FIGAS Huey marking could go on other captured helos or aircraft, real world of whiff. A Puma would be credible, a Pucara, MB.326 or Turbo-Mentor would be possible (forming a sort of "defiant gesture" defence-force air wing for a few years until the running costs bit), but the option I'm liking is a Hueycobra, disarmed and used as a flying crane. You could even get the AZ "joypack" AH-1G boxing with three models but no decals and build it as three stages in the life of the airframe: Argentine service, FIGAS service, then somewhere else. The real Huey went to an Australian operator then eventually ended up with the Papua New Guinea Defence Force, but I imagined the disarmed Hueycobra going to Romania for "fire fighting" then being found in a barn in Bosnia with improvised Soviet-pattern armament....

[Weaver]

Weaver, doesn't that Twin Otter kit have a BAS scheme included in the colour options, one of the kits I have does (got a Matchbox, Revell and a Modelcraft boxing), just need to find them all   

Mine doesn't. It's the Revell Classics re-issue (silver box with a medal on it) and it has two schemes: Canadian Rescue (yellow/red)  and Aurigny Air Services (Channel Islands).

[jcf]

On the PC-6, the AB coverage explicitly states International Orange and the photos
show it as being orange rather than red. 

Meh, ultimately, painting models is like horseshoes and hand-grenades, close works. 

[martinbayer]

I'd recommend to use this interactive online tool: http://scalemodeldb.com/paint

A quick try with the uploaded original picture showed Humbrol 1321 as a pretty good match (at least to my eyes, but then again I regularly fail the Ishihara test, so YMMV...).

Martin

[Weaver]

I'd recommend to use this interactive online tool: http://scalemodeldb.com/paint

A quick try with the uploaded original picture showed Humbrol 1321 as a pretty good match (at least to my eyes, but then again I regularly fail the Ishihara test, so YMMV...).

Martin

The only problem with that is that Hu.1321 is a clear colour intended for tinted transparencies (like tail lights) so the actual colour it would come out on the model would depend completely on the undercoat.

I don't think that tool, good as it is, is particularly up to date since it doesn't even have Hu.174 Signal Red in it's paint chart, let alone any of the new RLM colours.

[Weaver]

On the PC-6, the AB coverage explicitly states International Orange and the photos
show it as being orange rather than red.  

Looks pretty red to me, and they only had it for two years before they crashed it, so not a lot of opportunity for repaints:

Meh, ultimately, painting models is like horseshoes and hand-grenades, close works.  

Exactly, and this is whiff-world anyway, so if we can give them a totally different aircraft, we can certainly give it a slightly different shade of paint. I enjoy playing this game to get a convincing look, but only up to a point: if it got to the stage where an elaborate mix or a custom-manufactured paint was needed then I'd just change the back story to accomodate whatever I could get.

[jcf]

Then there is this series from Air Britain Archive Spring 2006. 

[Weaver]

Arrrrgh!

According to Wikipedia, there are three shades of International Orange, Aerospace, Golden Gate and Engineering. The orange on the PC-6 looks slightly darker than Aerospace IO, but much lighter than Engineering IO, whereas the latter looks about right for the Twotters....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_orange

I decided I needed to test the paints on a suitable undercoat, so two gash F-86 fuselage halves have just been sprayed white. Testing shall therefore commence in the morning.

[jcf]

The late '50s through '60s Beaver and Otter* pics in the Air Britain look like the Pilatus,
but the Twotters are definitely darker.

* 'cept Otter c/n 294 VP-FAI (aka VP-FAK, it was originally mis marked) it's IO in pre 3-62
markings and very 'reddish' in post 3-62 markings, which included 'Bas' on the port cowl in
Bass Beer logotype and roundels on the fuselage sides. 

[Weaver]

That's interesting. The S&M decal sheet seems a bit confused re the Otters. It has four roundels, four DHC badges, serials for 294 and 377 (they never carried their civvie regs) and pairs of Bas "beer logos" in white on clear, dark blue on light blue and dark blue on red, all of which implies that you can do two aircraft with it. However, it only has one set of the "Star Trek" style BRITISH ANTARCTIC SURVEY lettering that, according to the instruction sheet, was placed on the sides of both 294 and 377, across the roundel.....

It's a bit of a shame there's only one reg (VP-FBB) for a Twotter on the sheet, since there are three others, there have been at least two different styles of BRITISH ANTARCTIC SURVEY lettering, and all the other ones are configured for survey as well as transport work. VP-FBL seems to be the one with the full kit, having a ventral fairing (cameras?), wingtip pods (magnetometer?) "H" aerials on the nose and rectangular wire aerials under the wings. Seeing as Revell are re-issuing the Twotter, it'd be nice (not sure if it'd be profitable, mind...) if S&M did a conversion set with decals for VP-FBL and resin bits for all the lumps, bumps and aerials.

[Weaver]

Okay, first up, a colour test:



From left to right we have Hu.19 Bright Red (gloss), Hu.132 Red (satin) and Hu.174 Signal Red (satin). Colours were brush painted straight from the pot over a white undercoat. Lighting was a mixture of fairly bright daylight and a 6000K LED daylight bulb.

My thoughts:

Hu.19 is definately out.
Hu.132 "Red" is actually a pretty decent International Orange
Hu.174 is a good match for the "Twotter Red".

I think I've also nailed why there's so much confusion about these colours. Take a look at this search on Airliners.net: LINK It shows all the pics of BAS aircraft they have in date order from most recent at the top to oldest at the bottom. Note that some aircraft look orange and some look red and there is no pattern to it. I suspect that three factors may be at work (could be some or all of them):

1. This is one of those colours that changes significantly depending on the angle that light hits it and what's being reflected by it.

2. The paint wears and fades from a glossy red to a matter orange over the course of a season. There's a pic of VP-FBB taken in May in Canada looking satin orange but with the nose compartment door and several other bits looking more red.

3. These aircraft come back to the UK every year via a major service in Canada. I suspect that they get repainted fairly frequently, maybe as often as every two or three years (can't find a pic of one showing serious weathering...) and that the paint used may vary from year to year. The schemes on the aircraft have subtle variations anyway (wrap around black tips, lettering style, orange stripes on the upper wing next to the engines, blue cheat lines on the nacelles) and there's no sign that BAS has a strict policy about the colour of other equipment: vehicles range from yellow to red with every shade in between. I think therefore that some or all of the Twotters have been orange AND red at various points in their careers, depending on when they got repainted and by whom.

Since VP-FBB (the only one for which I have markings) seems to have mostly been red, I'm going to go with Hu.174 Signal Red for my whiff Skyvan equivalent.

Thanks for your help and input everyone.

[kitnut617]

Another thing to take into account Weaver, is the effect 'deep' cold has on the appearance of paint.  Even in bright sunshine, at -30C colours look different to what it looks like in the summer

[Weaver]

Fair point, but a lot of the airliners.net pics wern't taken in the Antarctic, they were taken in the UK or in Canada when the aircraft were moving around on their out-of-season journeys, and they still look distinctly red or orange.

[kitnut617]

If you want to wait a bit, I'll try to find my Modelcraft Twin Otter (it will have to be next week as we're doing a lot of stuff this weekend).  I've just discovered that it has five different colour schemes and one of them is the BAS scheme.  The decal sheet is not very helpful because there's not a lot for this aircraft, so I need to look at the instruction sheet so I can see what they have called up for the red.

Here's a pic of the decal sheet though, as you can see not a lot of decals for the BAS scheme:

[Weaver]

Yeah VP-FBL is the one with the full science/remote sensing provision. The fact that the kit doesn't include it doesn't make it wrong though because it's all demountable: you can find pics of her without it. The BAS lettering on your sheet is the earlier style: all caps and italicized. The aircraft have gained various badges over time, but if this is an earlier scheme then the lack of them is fair enough.

The sheet I have is for VP-FBB in post-2008 trim. The lettering is upper/lower case and a more rounded font, she has a BAS badge on the fin (white Antarctica shape in a blue circle) and an International Polar Year 2007-2008 badge on the nose.