81542 wrote:
Although of little consequence, one does wonder as to the "why" such large areas of the hull need "touching up" now though. After all, QE has not been in service that long.
81542
Although I wasn't aware of paint supplier issues as bad as Jamie describes, I am familiar with mtce and routine practices of several navies, including the RN.
Ships are constantly being painted. One of the recent photos shows where the giant badge was painted over on the front of the ski ramp. When ships are in port for more than a few days, mtce gets done. Often that includes painting over rust streaks or scrapes from tugs and piers that didn't move when requested.
The question then becomes, who does the painting? At sea, obviously the sailors. Alongside, not so obvious. In foreign ports there are local labourers that can be hired. At home ports, there are dockyard mateys and civilian contractors. The next question is, where does the paint come from? Large orders can come from base supply in gallon or multi gallon containers. Small orders may come from a local supplier. If you're only touching up a spot that's maybe 20' x 40', you might only need 2 gallons. You might not bother mixing two cans from the same batch. And you'd most likely be correct not to. But if you need to paint a larger area, you may need many gallons, from different batches, in which case, you'd better mix them together. In the case of QE, the amount of new painted areas is fairly large. To my eye, the new paint all looks like it was mixed together or came from a single large batch of pre mixed colour. However, I will say that photos aren't always good at showing more subtle differences in hue and tone, so I may be wrong.
A final note, I still maintain that paint on ships fades extremely quickly. I've seen differences between patches that were painted from the same can less than 2 weeks apart.
Oh, one more short story, the Japanese get the award for the freshest paint job. On a visit to NYC one year, I boarded a JDS destroyer and could smell the paint drying! Sailors were walking around with cups and small brushes constantly touching up everything!! It was the cleanest deck I've ever seen!! Even cleaner than fresh non skid!! The surprise came when I went inside. Dirty white walls with laundry hanging everywhere!! Like night and day!
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