PBY-5A

Just sitting here looking at my copy of The PBY Catalina in Action and most of the shots of the retractable gear PBY's (PBY-5A,-6A, OA-10 and Canso) appear to have the interior of the main gear wells painted black. In fact, the main gear assembly appears to be painted black. There is one picture taken in 1948 of a Coast Guard PBY-5AG, in which the aircraft is over-all aluminum and the wheel well appears to be aluminum also. To the best of my knowledge, the Navy stuck with zinc chromate as a primer until the early 50s when it changed to the epoxy family of primers. My understanding is that the Navy was dissatisfied with the properties of chromate (zinc chromate greatly retards corosion on aluminum and magnesium but will not block it completly), so they went with epoxy which gives much better protection. They did go to white for the reasons you mention.

bilbirk, I bought a great book on the PBY from squadron
http://www.squadron.com
PBY Catalina, in detail and scale.
Has quite a few color photographs, and on the light blue aircraft, the wheel wells are light blue. On the white aircraft the wells are white. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone building a PBY model.

DJ

I painted mine white. I have several sources and of course there were exceptions. I based mine on the one at the National Museum of Naval Aviation. Also one source quotes a T.O. that statedthat starting in 1940 all naval a/c would have their wheel wells painted white, making it easier to locate hydraulic leaks. I have also seen pictures of at least one that had zinc chromate wells and one that had silver!! but these pics were taken in the 50s, so I don't know if this military or civilian done paint jobs. Hope this helps.