George W wrote:
Thank you Dick (I think we have exchanged email before on RCN destroyers) and Darren (glad to hear from you again and hope all is going well).
I appreciate the time that both have you have put into this and I have been going around in circles on this!
Dick Thanks for the diagram and its applicability to Annan. The aft panel also fits in with what Darren thinks. As well as the relationship to Teme that pattern also applies directly to HMCS Ribble (MacPherson Frigates, pg. 97).
DarrenYou put a lot of work into this, thank you. I can see some patterns now that were not evident to me before. I thought that we were working with the same photograph then I noticed the anchor differences. I seem to remember that there were two B55s, is that correct? If so, is the old B55 close to 507C? I have the WEM greenish - blue B55. I need to look into this and refresh my memory. I have a number of Colourcoats that I can mix and match, i.e. B20, B30, and WA.
Sorry for double posting this request, I originally planned to post it at BritModelers but being a new member I couldn't get the OneDrive to provide the link, then I posted it to MW, and then returned to Britmodelers when I thought I had a solution, it failed, then I cross-linked them to remove all doubt about the double posting
Thanks again
George
Hi George, also posted on Britmodeller, but reposted here for completeness.
B55 is a colour which has left me a little less certain than the rest, although there are some aspects I consider to be fact.
What is a fact is that from introduction of B55 in April 1943 through to end of the war the published formulation and ratios of pigmentation remained unchanged. There is no evidence in the documentation record of an early/late version.
Richard and I have reason to believe that there were still civilian ready-mixed paints in use after the change over to the B&G series paints.
I've ended up offering two variants of B55 under our new range because when I made new oil paint from the official formula I ended up with a very weakly saturated shade. This 'feels' like it's right when used on Admiralty Disruptive Schemes, but juxtaposed with white on Western Approaches designs it feels like it would need to be a bit more saturated. Indeed the official formula gives something which looks a lot like MS4A is now known to (not the old Snyder and Short medium-light green) and nothing like the printed portrayal in CB3098 which Richard shared a photo of on the other forum*.
Hence I've made two versions, both 55% LRV in tone, one weaker and the other stronger in hue, and the modeller can either use one, the other, or blend them and still be confident of maintaining the right tone.
*This doesn't alarm me too much however as there is another formula in the official documents which doesn't really work and that's G20, which when I carefully weighed it out lacked enough staining pigments to get the white base pigments close to 20% LRV in tone, never mind the colour saturation. The Confidential Book's were issued with shade cards to match to which is what civilian suppliers would have used to determine their own formulae, and aboard ship or in a dockyard mixing oil paints I expect the official formulae would have been treated as instructive of the pigments to be used and the mixer would have used more of them if the formula gave him something lighter and paler than the shade card.
If the WEM-era paints you have are the RNxx ones rather than our new NARNxx paints, then the B55 is rather too dark at 39% Light Reflectance Value rather than 55% as is correct so if you're going to blend it with anything, blend it with a healthy dose of white rather than a darker still colour.