Does anyone know what the inside (with inside I mean wheel wells, flaps etc, (anything but the cockpit) colours are of the Bf109 ?? Thanks for any info.

RLM 02 Grau everywhere, including the cockpit on the earlier marks. Later mark cockpits were finished in RLM 66 Schwarzgrau

:-) Geoff is correct RLM 02 on wheel wells, gear legs and flap interiors etc. One thing though wheels are gloss black :-)
Mal

Hi there

Just to add to the above, there is some evidence that wheel wells etc. on German aircraft were left unpainted towards the very end of the war, as materials became scarce (and survival rates grew shorter...).

All the best

Rowan

:-) Thanks Rowan, that's something I wasn't aware of How many books do you actually have? :-)
Mal

Hi!
For unpainted do you mean natural aluminun?
What time or period to be more exact?
Cheers

Too many!...

Hi Mal and Armoured Sprue

This is all a bit technical and boring, but here goes...

I've re-read the relevent chapters of Michael Ullman's Luftwaffe Colours 1935-1945 and it looks like the changes might have actually come in a lot earlier than I'd thought.

The book is hardly light reading, containing numerous quotes from official RLM directives, but it does draw some surprising (and possibly controversial) conclusions:

Firstly, based on an 18th May 1942 document, which states that "Parts... not exposed to the free airflow will not receive any kind of surface protection.":

"The statements in the above text are clear; interior painting of aircraft was already abandoned in 1942. This means that materials, landing gear compartments, access flaps to the fuselage and so on, as for example on the Fw190, were no longer painted and the bare metal was left in its aluminium colour."

...and from a series of 1944 documents:

"It must be assumed from the above, however, that aircraft with simplified (i.e. no paint on interior surfaces ) and unpainted undersurfaces were the rule rather than the exception."

The book concludes that components based on iron, steel and magnesium continued to be surface protected, while aluminium was left un-painted.

This whole area is a mine-field... and I doubt that we'll ever know the whole answer...

Hope this helps

Rowan

Rowan is spot on. If you go awol ...shhhh...Sarge ain't lookin'...and take a look at an article on Hyperscale called "Late War Luftwaffe Fighter Camouflage" by David E. Brown you can begin to understand the complete muddle the luftwaffw/RLM were in during the late war years.
Basically they used whatever was at hand.
A giant mine field...still ...gives a lot of scope.
Wing waggles.
Peter