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P-47D Inner Cowl Color?


DBoger

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Looking at all my reference material I cannot tell what color the inner cowl is on the Bubble Top. Is it yellow zinc chromite, green zinc chromite, or Dark Gull green? I know the gear bays on the republic built birds were yellow zinc chromite with a dark gull green cockpit. Anybody wanna take a shot at this one?

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  • 3 weeks later...

Sure! I have no pride or reputation to uphold, so what the heck! :smiley4:

 

I think you have some leeway here......except for the dull green! The interior green colors (dark green, bronze green, interior green, etc.) were just that, interior colors that were designed to be used where a crew person would be in constant contact with those surfaces.

 

The rest of the parts were usually coated with some kind of corrosion protection; chromate paint being the most common (yellow or green). However, clear coated (Alcoa-ed??) aluminum was also seen.This was especially true for deeply buried parts and parts that would bear stress and/or get dirty, and which would be hard to get to and maintain (and/or clean). The wheel wells and wing spar are a good example of this.

 

I think you could go with either chromate or clear coated (NMF) aluminum on the inside of the cowl. I'd lean towards going the NMF route because if the zinc chromate yellow had been prevalent I think it would have been easy to document AND would also be easier to see in period pics (as shown in wheel well pics!). That said.....having thumbed through my book "Fighter Command", which is nothing but WWII era color slide pics, you can see nothing but shadows inside the cowl of a P-47. It's dark in there! The best pic of one of the red cowls Jugs does show the red on the interior of the intake dividers in the inside bottom, but this may have been done on purpose as part of that squadrons scheme, and cannot always be seen on other red cowled Jugs.

 

Another thing to keep in mind was that much of an airplanes assemblies were made up of sub-contracted assemblies, that were painted by THEM!. Thus, you could have a Jug with NMF inner cowl panels and gray painted intake divider assemblies, all with some overspray evident from the squadron color scheme on the cowl! It was wartime, and production was the priority and not adherence to any paint specs issued by the USAAF. This was especially true once the a/c was in the field!

 

I guess what I'm saying here is go with what your gut tells you to paint with, and let anyone else prove ya wrong with a pic of that particular bird! Best of luck!

 

GIL :smiley16:.

Edited by ghodges
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Oddly enough, this post today from Hyperscale relates directly to this discussion, although THIS post was made in reference to an F8F Bearcat interior cowl color....

 

"In the model picture you can see the interior green inside of the cowl. In the picture of the real thing, the inside of the cowl is a black hole. This is due to a number of reasons having to do with photography and physics. You may call it reverse scale effect if you like, but I try to paint the inside of cowlings a dark steel or metallic color. That tends to replicate the dark hole effect. I know it's not correct (in most planes anyway) but I like the effect it gives the completed model."

 

Jim Johnson

 

This is a GREAT point! It's the reason that some models, even when painted entirely in the correct colors (by specification) look like models, while other models with a little "artistic license" (i.e.-shadow shading, highlighted panel lines, post shading, etc) really pop out when we view them. It ain't about what's right....it's about what LOOKS right!

 

Hope this helps!

 

Gil :smiley16:

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I remember when I went to the Champlain Museum in Mesa, AZ back in '94, they had a "Jug" with the cowls opened up and they were zinc yellow. But you need to remember that this was a restored aircraft, not one off of the production line and in-service.

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