Posted by Roger Dawson
on March 10, 2009, 12:11 pm, in reply to "Re: The colour of ship's decks"
84.70.122.71
Reproducing teak decking is one of the hardest tasks for any model maker. I like Scherback's solution of using a wood laminate but "Fablon" is too thick to use in this scale! Perhaps Will Jayne can come up with a rectangular transfer sheet (with caulking) that would solve the problem?? Some of us standardised on Humbrol Authentic Colours "Teak Deck" 25 years ago but Humbrol discontinued it and although they produced a paint kit with a recipe a couple of years later, the result did not match the original! Wirral's recipe is nearer and John has published it on Dockside before but it is slightly too green and, if you try to make it warmer, too dark for my taste. I presume that Wirral use it because manufacturers have to be absolutely consistent and complicated recipes (two drops of this and three of that) are not consistent.
I believe that concrete decks came in as a wartime expedient. It was cheaper and quicker than planking and many people confuse it with corticene, which was "wood brown" linoleum. Nowadays the equivalent is an epoxy non-slip paint which may or may not have ground rubber in it and is more glossy. These paints come in a range of basic standard colours and Don is right that these can be seen on aerial photos (browse your local bookshops for coffee table books). Red always used to be red lead (red oxide) but now it is bright red or maroon/crimson lake. In the mid-c20th, shipping companies were not consistent in their use of deck colours on merchantmen (letters in Ships Monthly etc.), so it is unlikely that you will ever be proved wrong on a model unless you do not paint the decks at all. Coastlines default colour is Humbrol 121!
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