SPA Modeler

The Barracuda resin wheels have been painted. Every effort was made to have the tread grooves darker than the tread surface.

Those tires are beautifully detailed and painted up to match that level of detail! Great work John!

Thanks Carlos! The tires were a good distraction while my mind was wrapped up in an internal debate as to how I was going to proceed with the painting of the 262. I'm contemplating a switch in strategy to better accomplish two of the objectives, which are (a) hairspray chipping at the wing roots and (b) representing the putty showing through at the panel lines. I may spray the whole model in Tamiya AS-12 Silver, apply the putty lines in dark grey, apply hairspray, do a dark mottle in individual panels and then do the camo painting on top of this.

Sounds interesting John. The puttied panel lines present a new aspect for any chipping. Some sort of gray to replicate the putty should be good. Photos show it to be lighter in tone.

jkim wrote:The Barracuda resin wheels have been painted. Every effort was made to have the tread grooves darker than the tread surface.

That is magnificent John!
Just outstanding work!

- Kari

Those tires turned out great

Floki wrote:Those tires turned out great

I am just blown away by those brake line couplers...I’d swear that those are real from the appearance in both molding and painting.

Stikpusher wrote:(...) The puttied panel lines present a new aspect for any chipping. (...)

The puttied panel lines on German late war aircraft were and are a highly discussed topic. I read an article in which a guy who was involved in the restauration of the 262 of the "Deutsches Museum" in Munich states, that they didn't find any traces of putty under the paint. Instead there was a light grey anticorrosive paint on all areas where the duralumin was bend or in other ways mechanically shaped. Puttying panel lines adds a lot of weight and takes time. Two facts that speak against that theory, especially in times of dwindling resources.
Second point I want to make is that the idea of the laminar wing, that lead to the puttied wings of the Mustang, was already put aside by German engineers (Tollmien, Schlichting, Kawalki) and lead to the development of high speed wing profiles (for what also a captured Mustang was closely examined at the LFA in Braunschweig). So the reason for lower aerodynamic drag wasn't the surface quality in first place but the shape and wing sweep in particular. Although it has to be mentioned that the manufacturing quality of US aircraft in the last years of the war was far superior to their German counterparts.

End of nerdy engineer talk.

Thanks for the discussion! Especially from Torben and his info about puttying. I've had someone at LSP point out that the putty would've made the panel lines and rivets invisible but I've never believed that this would be the case, at least based on the photos of 262's that I've seen. My painting is based on the information contained on Experten Decal sheet ED-2A graciously supplied to me by author David E. Brown, which notes that the Dark Green RLM83 has been worn to reveal the underlying putty along the seams. I think that this observation is still valid but perhaps it was this anti-corrosive grey paint that Torben describes.

Stikpusher wrote:I am just blown away by those brake line couplers...I’d swear that those are real from the appearance in both molding and painting.

Aren't those neat? A little touch added by Roy at Barracuda that adds a bit of authentic detail to the wheels. I think I benefited from an inadvertent paint mistake... I had originally painted the couplers with metallic grey paint but did not like the look of them. I hurriedly overpainted them with a thinned mixture of dark grey and some of the metallic seeped through the grey.