Can anyone suggest any very accurate optical devices that can be used to record colour before stripping? I’m sure a camera is okay, but I’m after something super accurate.
Cheers
i run my own restoration/respray workshop. working with all types of vehicles and aircraft. restorebike.com. ive also produced some ww2 airframe parts for my own enjoyment into seeing how hard it is to produce a hard to get hold of item, such as a HE111 tail swastika..
ref the chromemeter thingy. if you pop round to the local car paint supplier they should have one of those gizmos. although a word of caution, as stated by previously the paint will have lost some of its true colour over the years, also its very true that colours at the time of manufacture were made “as close as”. on some stations where local repairs were made the replaced parts would also have been painted on site and not always to factory spec. during the building of a new aircraft many of the components were farmed out to smaller factorys to avoid mass destruction during a german bombing raid, so again each factory had its paint shop mixing paint “as close as”.
as a solution to try and gain the correct colour. carefully clean an area of airframe that has a good solid bit of paint, then apply a thin coat of satin varnish to bring back its true colour. try to avoid a heavy solvent based varnish as this may react with the paint, some if not most airframes of the time had a satin sheen to them.
other than that try contacting the resto centres at Cosford or Duxford and pick thier brains but im sure you may have already tried that?
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