Banshee Addendum, A Demon or Two, A Wrinkly Bomb, and a Bipe

A-24 Paint; A Slight Return

Or in other words, go back to yesterday's blog and take a second look at the part about painting the very first A-24s. I don't have a clue why I didn't do it when I should have done it, but I left out the BuAer letter that goes with the spec. I've appended that letter and cleaned up a couple of dates which should, with any luck, make the piece easier to read and understand. Another thing I failed to mention is that I anticipate some folks will disagree with the conclusion I've reached regarding those nonexistant blue/gray A-24s. Feel free to drop me a line at replicainscale@yahoo.com if you'd like to offer up your thoughts on the topic, or if you'd like to discuss anything else, for that matter. I enjoy hearing from you.

Photos of the Phantom's Phather

I know, I know; even I can hardly bear to read that title, but it seemed to fit the mood of the moment. I won't do it again until the next time I get the chance. Meanwhile: After years of waiting there are finally a couple of pretty decent kits of the McDonnell F3H Demon for us to work with, even though the mainstream manufacturers still haven't snapped to the notion that a good injection-molded, state of the art 1/48th scale F3H, FJ, F2H, F7U, swept-wing F9F, or F11F kit (or even 1/32nd scale; these airplanes aren't that big) would sell like the proverbial hotcakes. The short-run guys aren't really doing much for us in that regard either, come to think of it, but these are mainstream airplanes, for cryin' out loud, and they deserve more attention than they've been given thus far. Somebody please hold off on that "new tool" (I had to say it!) Me109 or A6M-Anything and give us some decent 50s Navy jets instead. Go boldly forth, etc, etc.

And on and on he rambles, never stopping and barely coming up for air, but the point should've been made by now so let's look at a couple of pictures:

An F3H-2 on the Franklin D Roosevelt during one of her early-60s Med deployments. The aircraft is being spotted on deck; note the towbar extending from the NLG. It's interesting to observe the people in these old photos; there's no doubt who the Chief is in this picture! No BDUs or Zumwalt uniforms here, by Jingo!  (Minimal use of cranials too---it was a simpler time, and a far more dangerous one if duty put you on the flight deck during ops.)  Frank Garcia

Home again. This Demon has just recovered; the cross-deck pendant (that would be the "arresting wire" if you don't speak Navy) has just disengaged and is beginning to retract. Flaps and slats haven't been retracted yet, but that's about to happen. Note the position of the horizontal stabilator.  Frank Garcia

Our official Gee What's Going On Here shot of the day. These Tophatter F3H-2s appear to be on either a pier or a lighter, but I can't figure out which although the line running from the tug to the upper left of the shot would suggest the latter. I'm guessing the airplanes are being transferred , either from the boat to shore or vice versa, but I don't know which. Flaps and slats are deployed and the horizontal stab is in the full "down" position. The photo provides a legitimate reason to model a Demon with everything hanging, although that would only be relevant in a diorama of this sort. There's never a dull day on The Boat.  Frank Garcia

Let's Get Bombed

Remember back several installments when we were discussing Vietnam-era Navy ordnance? Somewhere in one of those discourses I mention that the Nav's bombs began receiving coatings to the exterior of their casings to make them less likely to cook off in a fire aboard ship. Here's a fine example of that very thing:

This Mk 82 is hanging of an FA-18A during a mid-1980s WesPac deployment on the Constellation and illustrates that nasty coating to advantage. Paint your bombs like this and they'll probably throw you right out of the old model airplane club, but this was/is a fairly normal appearance for Navy bombs. Note how rough the surface texture is, how wide those yellow stripes are, and how the entire weapon contrasts with that light gray tail assembly. This Bad Boy is fused and ready to rock!  Rick Morgan

And Speaking of Weapons, and Maybe of Druts

OK, who knows the history of the Douglas F3D Skyknight? More specifically, what was it designed for? If you answered Fleet defense, you hit the nail on the head, although in all honesty the F3D was woefully underpowered throughout its service career and probably wouldn't have posed much of a threat to any serious intruder bent on sinking the boat. (During the Late Southeast Asia War Games it was given the nickname of "Drut". Spell "drut" backwards and you'll gain a better understanding of that whole power-to-weight thing with this particular airplane... ) Interception duties fell by the wayside pretty quickly for the F3D and the type ended up being used for limited electronic warfare (Vietnam), utility, and test duties. Let's take a look at a Skyknight that falls into the latter category.

Our last Navy photo for the day shows an F-10B (Mr. McNamara's designation for the F3D after the 1962 designation realignment), BuNo 124630, preparing to take off from China Lake during 1964.

 The aforementioned F-10B preparing to launch during AGM-45 Shrike testing at China Lake on 7 February, 1964. The airplane is an old stager and her skin tells the story; she's been around the block a time or two! The second seat is occupied by a civilian engineer---what a job!  US Navy KN-8883

A Blue and Red Airplane Because We Haven't Had a Model in a While

So how about a bipe to end our day with? The model is the Eduard Pfalz DIIIa done up to represent Rudolph Berthold's bird. It's the Eduard kit and is 100% bone stock, but that's usually not a bad thing with Eduard's Great War offerings; none of them are perfect and most have errors that require correcting, but they sure look the part when they're done!

Boy, does that paint just jump right out at you or what?  This exceptionally striking scheme was used on a number of aircraft assigned to Jagdgeschwader II during April of 1918 and makes for a really pretty model. The Eduard Pfalz is a great kit to build if you've never done a biplane before; it looks daunting in the box but the Pfalz DIII family were robustly designed and that simplicity extends itself to the model as well. Caution is required during construction but it's not as tough a date as you might imagine. What you see here took approximately two weeks of part-time work to accomplish.

Here's a 3/4 nose shot that graphically illustrates why you should always pay attention to what you're doing. On my model the entire nose is red, but there's extremely strong evidence that the bottom of it was silver on the real thing. Phooey! It looks ok anyway, though. (The phrase "don't turn it upside-down" comes to mind here.) Rigging is stretched sprue (this is me talking; could it possibly be anything else?) and could stand to have turnbuckles added, which I may go back and do some day. Unless I don't...

And a photo of the Pfalz being plucked from the modeling desk by a Giant Hand. Run away! No, wait---don't run away--- let me tell you about a couple of other things first! The rubber available to just about anybody during The Great War rarely had carbon black added to it when it was processed and was almost never black in consequence. Aircraft tires of the day ran the color gamut from light gray to a dark grayish-brown, and some had a distinctly pinkish cast to them. The "rubber" color here is a mix of my own and is of the pinkish-gray variety. The red and blue are Testor paint out of those little bitty square bottles that used to cost ten cents when some of us were kids (they most assuredly don't cost that anymore!), thinned about 75% with ModelMaster thinner and squirted on with a Badger 150, after which a thinned topcoat of new-formula Floquil Clear Flat was applied to knock off some of that super high gloss that comes from using Testor paint that comes in those little square bottles! Stickies are straight out of the kit as is the photoetch that you mostly can't see unless you look into the cockpit. The dust is one of those things that just happens sometimes. ("Dust Happens." What a slogan!)

And We're Done!

At least for a while. For now, why don't you go write a letter to all the major, mainstream manufacturers and tell them we need good 1/48th scale kits of 1950s Navy fighters, then build yourself a Pfalz? Either one, or both, of those things will keep you occupied for at least a minute or two! Oh, and be good to your neighbor too. We'll see you again real soon.

phil

Shades of Gray, Or One More Stab at the Warhawk

Or, to put it another way, isn't he sick of P-40s yet? Truthfully, the answer to that question is a resounding NO! I think I mentioned before that I love the airplane, that statement being a major clue to my mindset most of the time up to and including right now. We can put a caveat on this thing, though; we're almost done with the Warhawk for the time being, but there's one more item we need to address before we leave the subject.

When last we met, which wasn't all that long ago, we covered the painting and markings of Andy Reynold's "Stardust" in modest detail. During the course of that discussion we talked about the undersurface color of said aircraft and decided (I decided, anyway) that there was a very strong chance it could have been painted Neutral Gray. That opinion is based on photographic evidence. The fly in that particular glass of buttermilk is that it shouldn't be that color and there's more than enough proof to substantiate the theory.

Curtiss was painting their non-OD/NG P-40s to an RAF specification at the time "Stardust" was built, and they were substituting a DuPont light gray color for the undersurface shade specified by the British. That's documented. There are also a whole bunch of photographs, some in color, showing a light gray color on the bottom of the tan and green P-40Es. The evidence is undeniable, except for those pesky photographs that show a dark-bellied "Stardust" in concert with a similarly-painted aircraft that has a light colored belly.

There are a couple of possibilities to consider here, at least one of which could prove an embarrassment to those of us who've done Reynold's bird with a dark gray undersurface. To wit:

The undersurfaces actually were light gray (or light blue gray) but don't show that way in photographs. Some of the 49th's early P-40s were still in existence in Australian salvage yards as late as the mid-1960s and were documented at that time, although our particular specimen wasn't one of them. There were, however, several hulks in the RAF scheme, and they were recorded as having light gray undersurfaces.

The airplane was filthy dirty. That particular circumstance shows up well in every photograph I've ever seen of "Stardust". There's no doubt in my mind that she was well maintained, but she wasn't clean by a long shot, which seems to have been the norm for early-war 49th FG P-40s regardless of camouflage scheme. Those photos could just be showing an airplane that's a little dirtier than those around it, thus making the undersurfaces appear to be something they were not.

The published photographs are of poor quality. There's no contradicting that one either; a lot of the photos of this particular airframe are stills from a movie which hides some detail. We can only hope that somebody's previously unknown and unpublished photos of the 49th, and maybe even this particular airframe, will come to light in the years ahead, but it ain't happened yet so we really can't count on it. (Anybody out there got any unpublished 49th FG P-40 pictures? Maybe some Kodachromes? Maybe a Kodachrome of "Stardust"?)

Or maybe, just maybe, this one particular airframe did indeed have a Neutral Gray belly. We all know it shouldn't have, but maybe it did. Maybe it was a repaint, either partial or complete, possibly in conjunction with some sort of major (it would've had to have been catastrophic, though) repair? Maybe it was painted incorrectly at the factory? At this remove it's almost impossible to know.

One thing is for sure, maybe; "Stardust" didn't have U.S. ARMY painted under the wings. That particular distinction was reserved for the aircraft built specifically for the AAF, and our subject was off an RAF contract. Then again maybe it did have it. After all, it shouldn't have had that color down there either, and it seems that it did. I'm betting it didn't say "U.S. ARMY", though.

At this point you may well be wondering why I don't have any photos of the real airplane attached to this piece. It's the logical thing to do, except that I'd have to offer scans of photographs that have appeared in the published works of others, and I'm not about to do that; I respect the notion of "copyright". What I have done is appended a couple of photos of another Warhawk model, this time one that's in the "proper" scheme, so you can get some idea of the tonal differences. This new offering is Ben Irvin's #75 "The Rebel", which was in the squadron at the same time as "Stardust" and was definitely painted in the correct light gray undersurface color. The paint used here is ModelMaster 36440, and the model isn't nearly as weathered as "Stardust". (As an aside, I use slightly tinted 36118 for my Neutral Gray because of my first father-in-law, who gave me a solid model of a Martin B-26 that he build while he was in the AAF during the war---he painted it with "the real" colors, taken from paint cans on the flight line, and the Neutral Gray is almost a dead-ringer for that color (36118) as offered in the Model Master enamel line. That's a good enough reference for me.) The model of "The Rebel" doesn't have the U.S. Army verbage under the wings in Insignia Blue, and it possibly should have since no RAF serial is visable in any known photo of the airframe---if that's true then the model probably shouldn't have the IFF antennae fitted either. That's another unknown that I don't have the answer to and, just to add fuel to the fire, take a comparative look at the two photos of the undersurfaces. They were taken on the same day and within 3 minutes of each other, but I moved my lighting and the position of the model slightly for the second shot, thus changing the perceived color slightly. There's a lesson there for us all, I think.

Now, are you ready for me to change the water a bit? Are you Warhawked out for the time being? Let me see what we can do about that. In the meantime, be good to your neighbor. We'll talk again soon.
phil