Seems Revell goes back and forth between black and semi gloss for aircraft tires and armor bogies. I printed out a bunch of their instructions for reading during the commute.
I've always used flat black or Testors Rubber..unless the Army has some poor grunt polishing tires with Armor All...
Craig
I use Testors "Aircraft Interior Black" for tires...it's about perfect. More of a graphite sort of shade, like the previous Aeromaster tire color - semi-gloss. Check it out!
Musicman59 wrote the following:
Tires are not black, They are a variation between very dark grey when new, or a lighter grey when old. Look at the tires on your car, unless you have added a tire dressing, they are no different than what was available in WWI. Of course, mud and dirt will change the color.
I'll second that, and add that full gloss and full matt finishes are also very rarely appropriate for *any* scale model. Maybe large scale cars should be glossy, and "Special Night" finishes on British bombers should be matt. Otherwise the lustre should be between slightly satin and close to matt. I'd call this "scale lustre" but I'm sure the arguments would never stop.
But different surfaces should have different lustre, and tyres are mostly on the glossy side of satin. They should be dark grey, perhaps with a bit of dark blue added.
That's where Testors Aircraft Interior black really does the job...it's not really "black", it's a dark graphite color, and semi-gloss. You can also rub it and change it's luster a bit in random places. Highly recommended.
Many years ago, Testors had a color called 'Rubber'. It was sort of brownish-black, IIRC. It was in the little 1/4(?) oz bottles. I haven't seen those locally in many, many years so I don't know if it's still available or not.
Yes - I have some. It's too brown, IMO. Good for boots, etc. though. Aircraft Interior Black looks far better on tires.
it was as of 2 years ago.
Actually, tires were black. After a while would get a gray tinge on sidewalls, bit of grey inside treads. where tires touched the runway, were always black, usually new layer would be burned off at landing (which explains the bit of smoke and those nice stripes on a perfectly clean runway.
SR-71 tires were dull aluminum, bit of bright silver on edges, discarded after 3 flights.
we did a bit of back channel horse trading with China Lake. They used A-7s for pilotless drones, they'd get our crap tires, we'd get their newer ones for our flight test A-7. Same with lots of other equipment. At the time our company was still subsidiary of LTV which built the A-7.
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