The Little World

Specifically, whatever happened to the colour Sky as applied to the underside of British and Commonwealth aircraft? The underside of this Canadian CH 147 Chinook seems distinctly visible, as the bronze-black and deep green camo scheme – as admirable as it seems on the top and sides of the helicopter – wrap around down under as well.

It must save the airframe shop from ordering extra tins of spray paint and cleaning out the guns…but surely it must attract more work when it comes time to repair the machine-gun bullet holes after the enemy see ’em coming against the sky and open up.

Well, anyway, this was one paint job that was going to call for something different from the ordinary A/B camouflage paint job. The antennae and protuberances that dot the top and bottom would stop any liquid mask from coming off cleanly and any tape from going on easily – so it was going to have to be freehand from the start.

Well, the new Mr. Hobby gun was going to have to pass the test eventually – and it has been doing pretty well so far. I took the precaution of undercoating with Mr. Surfacer 1000 in grey. Then I drew the camo pattern on in very light lead pencil. The two colours were strong enough to do effective masking against a line as long as it was not too reflective.

The Mr. Color lacquer for the bronze-black used up a jar and a half but there was enough volume in one of the jars to accomodate the volume of fluid. I now have more of it than needed for a long time, but there will be more Canadian prototypes, I’m sure. The green was a direct choice so it could be replicated off the shelf.

The Procon Boy WA gun dials down quite a ways in both air pressure and needle travel, so with the tip protection crown laid aside and a thin enough lacquer you can get in pretty close to follow the plan and establish a painted boundary. Once this is down and you can see that it has not had too much overspray, you open it up a bit and start to backfill. I’ll confess that there was a little puddling in some areas and splatter in others, but I was intending to flat it out later. The bronze-black was a gloss colour despite one of the components being semi-matt.

Did it work? Yes. Did it work to my satisfaction? Yes, indeed. From the front where the masking worked as advertised, to the rear where the turbine engines made it difficult to spray between them and the tail, it has all come up pretty much as I expected.

The final flatting spray chosen was the water-based Mr. Topcoat by GSI Creos. The cans are small  and expensive, but the application was kept light enough that there are a couple more aircraft in the spray can. I had deliberately figured upon the lightening effect of a matt spray when I chose colours – thank goodness I was right.

And I didn’t knock off any of the antennae. Yet.