Will we see this mystery solved in 2018? :highly_amused:

Very interesting to see these photos, and the colouration process does bring a bit more life to them.

…but sometime I think the colours are too vivid for my tastes.

The Schneider Trophy photo is maybe a good example of this. The blue and yellow of the aircraft jumps right out the page, but still look a bit flat and two-dimensional. I’ve tried re-colouring black and white photographs, and it is hard work. Something I’ve noticed is that even colour photos aren’t necessarily that colourful. The sky isn’t often a pleasantly sky blue colour for instance. In the Schneider Trophy photo there are features on the boat in the background that appear to be coloured brown, almost because they had to have a colour of some sort. This isn’t necessarily the case.

In the case of the following photograph of the rock band ‘Hot Tuna’, I got as far as colourising the bassist Jack Casady before parking the project:

I gave up partly because the original black and white photo was fairly low resolution, and also because I couldn’t clearly see how the drums should look. I studied colour photographs of 1970s rock bands simply to try and get the colour balance right on the bassist. Even though he is clearly Caucasian, I didn’t tint his arms and face a sort of Percy Pig-shade of pink because a lot of old concert photographs have a much warmer hue to them.

I had better luck with the following image:

…colourising it:

In the case of this photograph I had better luck. Then again I still got unstuck! The speaker cabinets behind the bassist are a fairly dull silver/grey shade. I know this because I’ve seen Hiwatt amplifier cabinets in real life! In the black and white photo they look dull, so how do you bring them to life? I filled them in with a very subtle blue, but even then I’m still not happy with them. I never finished off the bottom third of this photo!

The other thing I struggled with was the bass guitar itself. I know that this bass guitar had a ‘sunburst’ finish (red through to yellow in a gradual transition), but you wouldn’t be able to see too much of this given the lighting in the photo.

Anyway, I hope you don’t see this as too much like flat-out criticism. I’m just a dabbler whereas you are doing this quite seriously! I hope you find my post to be of some use.

After the washout at East Fortune this year I’m waiting until 48 hours before the show prior to purchasing any tickets. I wouldn’t be buying them months in advance.

Seems a bit of a shame to have no airshow at Scampton for the 100th anniversary.

Toothpaste is a mild abrasive, and I’ve seen it used on guitars and cars very occasionally. Definitely a budget solution at best. The biggest issue, for me, is the lack of data. For example, nobody has measured the difference in ‘grits’ between brands of toothpaste!

If you can afford better products then I would avoid toothpaste as a buffing compound entirely; especially on vintage aircraft parts where you have one shot at it. The minty smell might get annoying, and some whitening types might impart a blue stain if anything.

The track Partridge is air bass’ing to is Music for Chameleons by Gary Numan, a keen flyer who was part of the Harvard Display Team; often piloting Harvard G-AZSC as painted to represent a Zero.

The cheque is in the post? :angel:

EDIT: Doh! RAFRochford got there first. We can split the winnings?

The strut issue would be a kicker though. A fairly obscure part to try and replace, which would translate into a major financial outlay for whoever picked up the project.

Perhaps the simple truth is that the Twin Pin is a somewhat ugly, unloved aircraft with a fairly limited appeal as a result. It is also pretty well represented; there is a cockpit section and complete airframe in Scotland (which is impressive given that we have a handful of aviation museums at most). Outwith Scotland it isn’t too hard to imagine that the interest dwindles pretty quickly. Cosford have a nice example stored safely indoors, so do we need others? Had G-APRS been restored to flight then it would hardly be filling the Vulcan-shaped hole on the airshow circuit.

East Fortune might have been the best shout for purchasing G-APRS (Scottish museum with both space and money), but they already have G-BBVF.

One Italian Heineken later… surely you can only assume so much about the attitude of the Vulcan without knowing the attitude of the camera ship?

While the original image has been flipped to add a sense of drama (presumably), I rather like it! Roly Falk, Farnborough, bombers handling like fighters ‘n’ all that.