So I've been doing a lot of thinking about what colors I want to use to repaint N8180A. Whether or not to go original with Serge Blue or come up with something new. Decisions, decisions...
8180A has been in primer for as long as I could remember. This weekend, I was cleaning out his old shop and I came across some interesting items. First some old PPG paint cans that were labeled Indian Silver and Medium Blue Glamor Color. I vaguely remember him saying something about the Indian Silver when I was younger. Anyway, this Durathane is old stuff and no longer available. I took them down to my local PPG auto paint store to get some more information and they said they could match up the colors using PPG Concept. I had them mix up a pint of each to do a test panel. This paint has some metal flake in it so it is *shiny*.
Now, the cool part. I found some old slides in a box that I almost threw away. Inside I found the only known photo of 8180A before it was stripped in 1986.
I am going to try to get that slide enlarged for better detail.
My thought was to strip the primer/paint off the plane and see if the aluminum could be polished. If not, then I would paint the base color silver and then the blue '52 trim.
Sounds like a good plan. You DO know that the slide is not the original paint job for the airplane, right...? These airplanes left the factory in natural aluminum with accent colored stripes/numbers. So the "base color" in the slide was added at some point, likely in a complete re-paint.
'53 B-model N146YS SN:25713
50th Anniversary of Flight Model. Winner-Best Original 170B, 100th Anniversary of Flight Convention. An originality nut (mostly) for the right reasons.
Yes. It's not totally clear to me what the color is in the slide. It almost looks white to me. I sent the slide off to get digitally scanned. I will start stripping small parts of the plane soon to get an idea how the aluminum looks
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