Fiddlers Green He-178

[avro202]

In my continuing quest to create a realistic metal texture base, I have started in on repainting the He-178 from Fiddlers Green. The model instructions encourage you to print it onto Red River Silver paper, but as that stuff doesnt exist anymore, I thought I would see if I could come up with an alternative!

I started out with the texture I am using for a repaint of the F-104, but found one that looked better, IMO. After a fair amount of tweeking, this is how it (more or less) looks on the computer screen, in Photoshop.

I just printed out the 4 pages. They are considerably darker than the screen image, but should still work. I will be cutting and gluing this together hopefully over the weekend. Its a pretty simple model (around 20 parts or so) but the scale is really large. Should be interesting to build!

[MacSongLi]

This looks like it's going to be a lot of fun. I will be following closely. I'm still working on trying to get the FG MiG-15 to look good. I'm using gimp, and I found the same problem as you. It looks great on screen, but when you print it, it is a lot darker.

Good Luck!
Gary

[avro202]

Good luck with that! I looked at doing the same thing to the Mig15, but the lines are drawn so thick, and the black and white version is so "dirty" that figured it would never look any good unless I was willing to redraw the whole thing.

BTW, in case you were wondering about the oddly coloured (orange) panels on the He 178 (I know I was), here is an explanation from another forum I frequent where I asked about it-

<b>

Does anyone have a reference to the 178 in orange, or knows if orange was used by the Luftwaffe on X-craft or research craft during WWII?

Orange??? No the Luftwaffe never used that colour for their training planes. In fact the only "RLM Orange" colour they had was more like a soft Yellow.

The kind of "orangy" parts on the H-178 plane on your picture (nose and engine area) is due to the alloy employed for those areas on the plane: It's a special ZA* high-strength Zinc-Aluminium-Copper alloy ( it also included some magnesium) and it consisted of about 12% aluminium, 2% Copper, and the rest Zinc, with some trace amounts of iron, lead and cadmium). Worked on this at one point for about three years when employed by Reynolds Aluminium in Québec: The parts we did were for the Canadian Army Frigate Ships, and the metal was Exactly the same Orangecolour when it came out of the smelter/extrusion process. When you add more Aluminium to it it's Purple color, and when less it's Blue. So it's a VERY peculiar alloy: to get the orange color you need between 10%-12% aluminium and 1-2% copper exaclty, and also to get something with useful proprieties, of course...

It's very hard to make any kind of paint adhere permanently to it, too.

ZA is for the trade name of the alloy, licenced in the 30's: "Zamak". The name zamak is an acronym of the German names for the metals of which the alloys are composed: Zink (zinc), Aluminium, Magnesium and Kupfer (copper).
</b>

[MacSongLi]

avro202,

I wound up doing a complete re-draw complete with rivets, and a little more details. Lots of work, it turned out good, but I really wish the aluminum finish looked better. I'll have to keep working on it.

That is really interesting about the metallic alloys and their colours. I never gave much thought to paint having to stick to some of the metals.

Best of luck, I'm looking forward to seeing your progress.

Gary

[avro202]

Here is my first build of the recolored 178. Not bad. I rushed it and really messed up the wings, but then I was more interested in the overal look of the paint job than in getting the build perfect. The wings got badly mangled and miss-aligned. But whatever...the main thing is that the metal effect isn't all that great. I have to work on the white streaking so the surface looks more reflective.

So its back to Photoshop for me followed by another round of building.

(And I wont bother building the landing gear until I have something worth keeping.)

[papermodelfan]

Wonder what would happen if you hit it with semigloss dope. Speed Boats (that is deck ape) uses the super gloss, and it really shines paper up. Maybe a mix of semigloss/matte would give you the finish you want?

[3Turner]

Originally Posted by avro202

But whatever...the main thing is that the metal effect isn't all that great. I have to work on the white streaking so the surface looks more reflective.

So its back to Photoshop for me followed by another round of building.

(And I wont bother building the landing gear until I have something worth keeping.)

Have you seen Rob's recoloring tutorial over on Fiddlers Green? In it, there is a section on how to simulate a bare metal finish.

The tutorial has been moved way down the home page in a block that says "Cardmodel Design Tutorials" (right above the red Starduster biplane), then click "Recoloring Card Models".

[MacSongLi]

Excellent clean build. Avery nice job, I do like the blending with the copper/zinc metallic. It definitely isn't too dark. Keep up the great work.

Gary