CLEAR DOPED LINEN

Linen soaked in dope

The covering of aircraft from the time of the First World War was fabric impregnated with cellulose dope. That tautened the cloth, sealed it and at the same time gave it a characteristic yellowish cast, the depth of which differed according to the maker, the number of coats and how many months the machine had spent in the sun. It is exactly this range that the three bottles cover.

The first tone matches a warmer covering shifted toward gray, the second is deeper and heads toward beige, and the third stands for fabric washed out by the sun and rather ashen. By combining them the surface can be played out panel by panel: the upper side of a wing lost its color sooner than the underside, and the ribs tend to be a shade darker than the open bays between them.

Volume and working

Each bottle holds 17 ml and belongs to the third-generation acrylic range, so it is thinned with water, passes through even a finely set nozzle and stays flat once dry. On fabric surfaces it pays to apply very thin paint in several passes, so that the coat does not fill the fine relief of the ribs and the sewn seams.

It finds use not only on machines from the years 1914 to 1918 but also on interwar biplanes and on the control surfaces of aircraft that had a metal fuselage and only fabric-covered controls.

The shades can be mixed with one another, so the three give a continuous series of transitions for the individual bays of the covering. Many builders start with the deepest variant as a base and then brighten the middle of the bays between the ribs with the lighter ones; that gives the surface a depth a uniform coat never has.