Hi all,

After my disastrous La-7 I'm back in the saddle with Hase's Rumanian Hurricane and I have a couple of quick questions.

1) The instructions say "Silver" for landing gear, wheel bay and other interior parts. Is this a "bare metal" type of silver or an actual silver paint? What type of paint would you use (Metalizer, aluminum, etc)?

2) I have the Eduard landing flaps for this kit, would the inside of these also be painted silver or the RAF interior green?

3) Was the seat metal or the resin that I have read some were made of? This is important when it comes to adding wear and tear. If they were resin, what color was the resin?

Thanks in advance!

-Derek

If the seat was bakelite, , then,as farb as I know it only comes in black.

Mark,

Thanks for the reply. The instructions say that the seat should be painted the RAF interior green. I guess the Mk. I Hurricanes seats that the Romanians used were steel or aluminum?

Hurricane seats were metal, and painted the same green as the rest of the interior. Plastic seats, as in the Spitfire, were not bakelite, but a bakelite-type resin/paper mix, hence the red colour. "Silver" is painted silver, not n/m; u/c areas were painted so as to inhibit corrosion. The flap interiors were likely to be silver, like the u/c bay, but (and it's a big "but") the pilot's instructions were that a/c should never be taxied with flaps down; on landing "up" was to be selected, immediately, before any other action. Forgetful pilots were likely to be "fined," by the CO, with the money going into the mess fund; this tradition carried on post-war.
Edgar

Edgar is quite right. I think the usual penalty for dropped flaps was to buy a round of drinks in the mess. However, this girl has obligingly dropped her knickers.




The inside of the flaps doesn’t look like aluminium paint to me. Could be interior green but looks more like the same colour as the undersides of the wing, in this case Sky. The wheel hubs do look metallic though. It is just possible to see that the starboard flap is also a light colour although the wing has been painted black.



So they probably sprayed over the closed flaps when it was painted. No reason for them to go the trouble of opening the flaps and painting the insides as well. Difficult to tell what the did with the wheel wells and undercarriage. These two 303 Spitfires are stills I took from a film clip. One of them has the undercarriage painted black like the wing but the other’s hasn’t been repainted.

Gentlemen,

Thank you so much for the info! Google only turns up so much. I think I will omit the Eduard landing flaps, though I was looking forward to building them. But then again, I won't have to buy everyone a drink, will I? I'm hoping to start cutting plastic and squirting paint this week. It's been a while since I did a build log so I may do that as well.

-Derek

Hi Derek,

Congratulations on your decision to build tone of the most beautiful machines that ever flew in WWII. Now getting to the point, the flaps of the Romanian Hurricane is definitely RAF Interior green. The seat as well. Also the undercarriage went all in aluminium flat, bare metal. And if you ask me, when I did mine I have used MM metalizer. But as you may see in thelinks below, Radu Brinzan used RAF Interior Green on the Accessory pistons from the undercarriage.

But there are lots of other mistakes in that kit that you need to correct before making it Romanian:

1. The propeller should be DeHavilland, and not the Rotol they provide. It is a very "rude" one what they give in there.
2. Next, the Romanian HH were sporting a very nice painting scheme which did not include SKY on the undersides. The pics should be concludent enough. You need to paint one wing white and the other black.
3. The crossess are OK, so is the St George = Mickey Mouse insignia, but I would kindly advise you to paint the rest (meaning yellow band on the fuselage and the tri-colour on the direction)
4. The numbers for the undersides are wrong, one should be white and the other black, and they should be more thin and longer.
5. Take care when you paint the stripes on the propeller, about width and colour sequence. Also the spinner cowl is 1/3 yellow and 2/3 black.
6. Don't use a too lime-ish yellow. Tamyia flat yellow should do the job, and flat red and blue from them are also more than appropriate.
7. The kit does not include many stencils simply because, ....nobody knows how did they look like. Also they do not appear in any photo I have seen, and there are not too many photos arround. Sadly, none of these machines survived the soviet "friendship", mostly because they used to shoot the soviets down in defense of Constanta and Odessa (sic!)

Please check this other links as you may (or not) find them useful:

My Hurricane
More detailed photos of my HH
Discussion about the pla nes used by the ARR (Aeronautica Regala Romana) in the second world war
The same machine done in 1/32 by another Romanian modelist, Radu Brinzan He also produces decals for Romanian aircraft, search ebay for RB Productions

I am wishing you luck with the build, and I will follow it closely, as i intend to build a second one, the No. 3 of Plt. Agarici Ion - the man who shot down 3 Pe-2 in the first day of the war against Russia.

Cheers!

Gabriel,

Thank you very much for the link to the pics. It will help a great deal! A question though. How did you differentiate the silver of the undercarriage and that of the actual landing gear piston? Did you use a chrome silver for the piston and aluminum for the rest?

Also, I used the Eduard cockpit zoom for this kit and the green it used is a different color than the RAF Interior Green I have seen. I went a head and matched the rest of the paint to the Eduard color since it would be more difficult to repaint the PE, but I'm just curious why Eduard would have a different color, which has a bit of blue in it. Again a couple of drops of Humbrol blue in with the Testors RAF Interior Green matched it perfectly.

-Derek

Well, there are some metallic pastes I use from Agama which are able to replicate polished aluminium, like those in the landing gear door of the Mustang, or similarly, the moving part of the landing gear piston.

I think you can find them HERE

They are very OK and can be used for a large number of things.

Hope to hear from your side, with the finished build.