trouble with WWII navy "intermediate blue"

Do you have a FSN color chip deck? It comes in real handy for questions like this. I use the colors out of the bottle usually. They are close given manufacturing tolerances, how a person feels on a particular day at work, weathering and the like. I do have one or two formulas, but they are with out of production paints. You would have to try to find similar colors and it would probably still be off.

Those are the colors I used frontside on my Accurate Miniatures SBD-5 and it looks pretty good to me :)

There is a large color chip of ANA 608 intermediate blue in the back of "The Official Monogram US Navy & Marine Corps Aircraft Color Guide", Vol 2, 1940-1949 by John M. Elliott. He also lists this color as FS 35164, however this looks too dark and blue to my eye, more like the blue-gray used on the earlier naval aircraft color schemes.

The closest match in model paint I've been able to find is Polly Scale US Intem. Blue A/N 608 #505094. It is almost an exact color match to the color chip, except that you might need to lighten it a bit for scale. By the way, this color is very gray looking. It is lighter and grayer than the blue-gray. Do not confuse these two colors, they are totally different.

This is enough to give someone the "blues". Good luck.

Pete

The Model Master Intermediate Blue matches color photographs of tri-color WWII Hellcats and Corsairs pretty well. It does look more grey in the bottle and when you first spray it, but when it cures it takes on the blue shade. Test it on a scrap piece of styrene that has the same primer/undercoat to be sure. Due to War Time expediency, many of the real birds were painted with a very thin coat of Dark Sea Blue over White on the sides and then heavier coats of Dark Sea Blue on the upper surfaces. I think we modelers worry more about matching color chips than the factories that filled the War Machine.

Rick

In a color photo I've seen of a line up of F4U-1A's at a South Pacific island airbase, the airplane at the very end of the line is apparently new and has factory fresh colors. The others in the line are veterans and so faded that you would never guess that they once had the same colors as the new airplane. The difference is really startling.

I tend to favor the more grayish intermediate blue, but by the time I am thru weathering it has no semblance to what originally came out of the bottle or tin anyway.

Jim