EARLY COLD WAR RAF AIRCRAFT COLORS

Postwar Britain between silver and gray

The 1950s were a period of polished metal for the Royal Air Force. Meteors, Vampires, Venoms and early Hunters flew in uncovered duralumin or under a silver lacquer, and dark camouflage schemes only came in gradually. The five shades link both stages and let a builder move from postwar elegance to the look of the early Cold War.

Two bottles belong to covering matte tones, a Dark Sea Grey to the British Standard and a Dark Green. The remaining three are metallics: a basic aluminum, a darkened version of it and a matte form. By combining the last three you can convincingly imitate a real surface, where neighboring panels never shine quite the same.

The metallics are made in a more involved way than ordinary covering paints. They rest on a lacquer base, call for a smooth glossy undercoat and do not tolerate mixing with water-thinnable products. They are applied exclusively with an airbrush and in a really thin film, otherwise they lose their metallic sheen.

The selection will serve the Gloster Meteor F.8, the de Havilland Venom, the Hawker Hunter, the English Electric Canberra and the early V-bombers, that is the machines that formed the backbone of the Royal Air Force between the Korean War and the 1960s.

When masking metal surfaces, take care with adhesive tape. A thin metal film will tear away from a smooth undercoat even where an ordinary covering paint would hold without trouble. Use tape whose tack has been taken down beforehand on a piece of cloth, take it off slowly and at a shallow angle, ideally only shortly after the following layer has dried. The reward is a surface that looks like sheet metal rather than like silver paint.