Hornet deck

The hanger deck would be #20 standard deck gray, bulkheads and overhead white. Flight deck would be Norfolk 250-N Flight Deck Stain (not a paint). It did wear rapidly so the lighter wood color would start to show through in heavy usage areas like the landing area fairly quickly.

Great, that is not what I did by no means. So, this is a variation on history. I swaer why can't the Trumpeter people have been a little more helpful. Great color plate on the camoflauge pattern but be more specific on the hanger deck. Unless I missed something, guess, just like I did. I also thought the flight deck was a sea blue, you are telling me it essentially was a wood color. Is that true? I primed the flight deck with a wood and then went over it with a dark blue that I was going to wear down in spots to let the wood show through. Please tell me if the deck from the Doolittle raid was blue or woodstained. Thanks.

The natural wood tones would be showing through the areas where the stain had worn through as you had noted. The flight deck coloring was the subject of a very long thread that went on for many days over at modelwarships.com. The determination at the end was that the Hornet never had the mahogany stain since she went straight to camoflague at commissioning. The prime with a natural wood tone, cover that with the 250N blue stain and then lightly wear the blue off in the landing area sounds like the way to go. Photos from the Doolittle raid definately show the blue deck.

sounds to me like you painted the deck color pretty close especially if you showed worn spots as wood undertones. That's how I'm going to do it and how I did it on my Essex