F-16 "Passionate Patsy" P-47 Repaint

[Scotsman]

I was going to title this post "Gonna Need a bigger roll of Tape" , but I shamelessly stole the original title 

 

For those of us who don't spend time around real combat aircraft I'm always fascinated to see videos like this showing just how these special schemes are applied.

 

There are times when I watch them and think I could do that after all I can spray and use masks , but then my models don't cost $30Million a pop

 

Enjoy

 

 

 

[Stokey Pete]

Might take a while with our airbrushes, but much less guesswork as to which shade of F36375 to use. No pre or post shading either. 

[Oldbaldguy]

Watched this earlier.  That’s a lot of man hours right there.

[Alex]

Nice to see that the pros also sometimes have to sand down and try again.

 

That turned out to be a very attractive scheme, though for a real P-47 look I would have loved to see them strip it down to bare metal and polish it.  I realize that's not good for airframe durability, but they could have clear-coated over it...

[Oldbaldguy]

2 hours ago, Alex said:

Nice to see that the pros also sometimes have to sand down and try again.

 

That turned out to be a very attractive scheme, though for a real P-47 look I would have loved to see them strip it down to bare metal and polish it.  I realize that's not good for airframe durability, but they could have clear-coated over it...

At first I was going to comment that it would be tough to polish all that composite material but I looked it up and discovered that 75% of the airplane’s skins are aluminum.  Had no idea!  Learn something new everyday.

[Alex]

23 minutes ago, Oldbaldguy said:

At first I was going to comment that it would be tough to polish all that composite material but I looked it up and discovered that 75% of the airplane’s skins are aluminum.  Had no idea!  Learn something new everyday.

I'm surprised that an F-16 is only 75% metal skinned!  I know the radome is plastic, but what else...?

[Oldbaldguy]

2 hours ago, Alex said:

I'm surprised that an F-16 is only 75% metal skinned!  I know the radome is plastic, but what else...?

The graphic I saw showed that the control surfaces on the wings are honeycomb, the radome and vertical tail fairing are fiberglass and the rest of the tail and stabs are composite.  Everything else is aluminum, steel or titanium.  More or less.  For some reason, I always thought they just poured the thing out of a bottle into a big mold and waited.