Paper drop tanks

At this web site there is a picture ( scroll down ) of a whole pile of them that appear ( yeah I know black and white photo ) to be all silver. Or the same silver as the fuselage color of a P-51. The silver paint seems to serve no more of a function than that of a protective coat. I've seen photo's of paper fuel tanks that are also painted the same color of the bottom camouflage color of a P-51 or P-47 as well ( such as camouflage gray etc ).

Chris

They look like they are silver doped in this picture:

like a stack of small Zeppelins. :-) That's from here didn't realize that one of the reasons for using them was to prevent the Germans from collecting the metal of the aluminum tanks jettisoned on the missions.

Pat

More data on painting of the tanks here:

"The kit comes with the later 75-gallon metal drop tanks, but the plane I ended up modeling used the earlier paper tanks. If you have the Tamiya P-51B kit, you can rob the paper tanks from there. Otherwise you can use the nice resin tanks from KMC, which is what I did. The actual tank has a steel mounting bar along the top that KMC didn?t mold, so I added it with strip styrene painted Metalizer Steel. The tanks were sprayed with Tamiya Neutral Gray, which is correct for this plane at this time, even though the fuselage and wing undersides were unpainted."

Pat

I always liked the story behind these tanks. They were proposed and designed by a couple of people in 8th fighter command HQ to meet the need, and a contract was let to an English firm to run up a batch for immediate use. A letter was sent to Air Research & Development at Wright Field outlining the idea and asking for production to be implemented in the States. A few months later, after hundreds of these tanks had been expended over Europe, a letter was received from A.R.& D. command saying they had looked at the idea and found it totally impractical and no further action would be taken. Things always look different from behind a nice desk in a nice paneled office. And then there is the story of the reception given to "Pappy" Gunn's proposal to fit a 75mm howitzer in the nose of a B-25....

Bill Shuey