Hello,

Calling out to all of you MIG experts!

I stumbled upon a very attractive image of an abandoned Romanian MIG-15 UTI: http://www.airplane-pictures.net/photo/176549/2579-romania-air-force-mikoyan-gurevich-mig-15-uti/

As far as I know, these were all wearing natural metal finishes so I was wondering whether this information is wrong or if the gull gray tone to be seen in the image is oxide that accumulated with time and has been peeled off where the lighter tones shows...

Any ideas?

Many thanks in advance!
Cristian

I think that the MiG that you linked to has actually been painted gray. I did a quick Google image search for "Romanian mig-15" and got several hits where the aircraft was obviously gray. Could just be something that they did as the aircraft was nearing end-of-life, or maybe a change in camo policies.

Thanks Alystyr!

I'm building the red 767 from Eduard's 1:72 ProfiPack and the only image I was able to find (http://i661.photobucket.com/albums/uu337/F102dagger/MiG-15767-mod20102012copyright.jpg) shows an obvious NMF...

Glad I could help.
At least it should be easy to achieve that look - almost seems that Tamiya's "Flat Aluminum" would work, or possibly one of the other finer-grained aluminums out there.

Cristian,

As far as I have discovered, until MiG-23 and MiG-25, VVS and PVO never painted their jets except to camouflage them - no overall gray like, say, USAF ADC F-102, F-106, F-4, F-5, etc. I'm not sure they even camouflaged them until the 1970s.

PRC camo'ed their MiGs and very interesting schem,es.

Thanks Alystyr and JPTRR!

Over at modellboard.net (http://www.modellboard.net/index.php?topic=50815.0) I also got this answer as a citation of M. Orlow:

" ... From 1930s to 1950s AE-8 remained THE ONLY aviation OIL-BASED enamel of SILVER ( aluminum) color. As an oil-based enamel it was placed on the same page with aviation oil-based enamels. The use of all other aviation enamels of AE- brand was long time discontinued. (...) from the technical specifications 161AMTU we know that this enamel consisted of 90% of clear oil-based lacquer LM-15 and 10% of aluminum powder. Over the years the proportions changed a little but the basis remained always the same i.e. these two components only..."