Thank you.

I’m probably going to Kerala again in the spring so I’ll have another go

It seems that the Sea Hawk is affiliated with a ‘Napier Museum’ over there. The influence of meddling Scots perhaps?

Presumably the same machine discussed here;

http://www.yentha.com/news/view/4/A-Sea-Hawks-Tale

There is a suggestion that it was enamel based. In a well researched feature on the Spitfire prototype which appeared in Scale Models magazine issue March 1977 Harry Robinson wrote that a highly polished enamel finish was applied. He adds:

“This was a shade of blue-grey commonly called French Grey and was arrived at by adding blue pigment to a grey enamel base. The resulting subtle blend not only appeared blue to some eyes and grey to others but often photographed as a pale colour, although in reality it was rather dark as indicated by the yellow outlines to fuselage roundels and white outlines to black serial numbers.”

That is pretty interesting to read. Having done some sleuthing, it appears that ’30s enamel paints were based on alkyd resins. Ironically I’ve been spraying a bit of alkyd-based lacquer recently on a non-aircraft project and I could not get the stuff to dry. I understand that UV protection is minimal for alkyd enamel, so it is possible that, combined with weathering effects, K5054 subtly changed colour for the period it was painted this mystery blue shade.

If Harry Robinson is correct, then the Toyota paint mentioned in this thread is incorrect, as it contains a green hue that would be absent if one were to simply mix a grey and a blue paint together. Having said that, BS381 Light Admiralty Grey clearly contains a green-blue component. If we ignore this then we must assume that K5054 must have looked more like this:

I was in a bar a few years back that was styled as an old library. Amazingly the books were real and readily accessible! One book, dating back to the 1950s, was a highschool textbook on the subject of Africa. Coverage of native African people was scant; barely half a page in total. Helpfully, the book broke down native Africans into their four ‘types’, which must have helped kids back then immensely. I seem to recall that type four was “true negro”, depicted as just short of bone-in-nose-missionary-in-the-pot levels of savagery. I wonder if this was tested at O level?

What science knows and can proves is the equivalent of how much water a gnat crapping in the ocean would displace.
If they would spend more time to see how God might have done what God did, with or without the word God, rather than trying to prove what they think is how it should have been done, there would be no quarrels as they would go about it admitting they know nothing and are onlytrying to learn what might, or might not, have happened.

Have any qualifications to back up this claim? By default you appear to class ‘science’ as a singular, collectivist unit which suggests to me that your scientific qualifications come from the university of lyfe.

The idea that they (who?) are “trying to prove what they think is how it should have been done”, whatever that means, is perversely misguided.

If mobile use is now the leading cause of death at the wheel then I can only assume it is because cars and roads have become much safer over time.