Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
Sat, 19 Sep 2020
Building a Biplane: Paint Jobs
Although I'm still a decade away from having anything to paint, I occasionally think about what I'd like this eventual biplane to look like. To that end, I've been slowly collecting coffee-table books on golden age aircraft, and the COVID lockdown has given me enough time to go through all of them, learning about historical planes, but also keeping an eye out for paint schemes I liked.
When people ask me what I'm building, I have a photo downloaded on my phone, which I show. It's from the article, Glenn's Charger Flies Again, and I like how it shows the sweep of the wings:
As I have looked at this plane over and over when showing it to people, the red color has grown on me. I wasn't averse to it before, but between repeatedly looking at this photo and a flying experience I had a few years ago, I'm pretty sold on red.
What happened a few years ago was that I was in Norbert, my little Champ, flying out to Hoquiam on the Washington coast, for a FATPNW event. The weather was on the low side, with a solid overcast at maybe 4000 feet, so it was perfectly safe to fly, but there wasn't a lot of "up" available. The clouds lowered as we got close to Hoquiam, and were at more like 2500 -- still safe, but again, not much "up" available. I landed late for the event, and most people were ready to leave, so I only ended up being there for a few minutes. This was fine, as I was really in it for the flying, and have always had a hard time socializing with people I don't know.
One of the planes there was a Cessna 152 which had been painted bright red. I thought it was kind of garish when I saw i on the ground, but that changed completely when we flew out as a little group.
It was me (black and green), this 152 (bright red), and a couple other planes painted in the sort of generic white-plus-colored-stripes themes that are so common in the general aviation fleet. We had all departed in the same wave, and flew in something like a very very loose formation as we departed the Hoquiam area, over low rolling hills.
Being in a very loose sort of formation, I was pretty keen on keeping visual track of all my fellow aviators, to make sure we didn't get too close to each other. We were still half a mile apart in all cases, but that's pretty close, in airplane terms.
As I was tracking these various planes, every time I looked for the 152, I could find it immediately. It popped against the dark green scenery, with its bright red paint. The white planes were harder to spot. It got me to thinking: white is the same color as clouds and a lot of things on the ground. Almost nothing on the ground is bright red (certainly there are cars, but visually they're almost invisible because they're so far away). That bright red paint job made that 152 so much more visible than anything else.
With that thought in my head, plus repeatedly seeing the picture of Glenn's Charger, I've found myself inclining to a red paint scheme for my Charger.
I'm also a fan of black, though I think it's not a very good airplane color, just because it can disappear into the background with such ease. What about a majority-red paint job, with black accents? Sounds pretty good. I had put together a functional but not pretty model of the Charger in X-Plane, so I spent a few hours figuring out how to wrap my ugly grey model in a slightly prettier color, and came up with this, which is useful mostly as concept art:
This was pretty good, though obviously very basic. Not sure about the N-numbers, they'll probably end up being the 2" numbers that I'm allowed to use rather than these 12" numbers. But the basic idea is there.
Then, when I was flipping through my various coffee-table books, I came across this Waco CTO on page 36 of Wings of Yesteryear: The Golden Age of Private Aircraft by Geza Szuravy, and I thought, yes, this is the look:
The exact shade of red may or may not be correct, but I love the tapered black stripe with the little harpoon-head at the front, and the gold pinstriping.
I certainly can't promise my final paint will look anything like this, but at this stage in the process, I like it a lot.
Posted at 12:21 permanent link category: /charger
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater