Wrong Gunmetal paint?

FS means the Federal Standard number. I think what you really need is probably 'Steel'(#1180) or 'Flat Aluminum'(#1181). Once upon a time I would have advised Pactra 'Steel' but that's no longer available. Thanks, Testors. :(

Bill Banaszak, MFE

The term 'gunmetal' as a color description is very vaque. It is not the same as gun blued metal, but certainly can be ambiguous beyond the fact that it should probably be grey. Is gunmetal shiny or matt? Depends a lot on final surface treatments and history since fabrication.

Even steel is not a very useful term. The term steel would seem to say it is different than cast iron, for example. But again, the color of unfinished steel depends a lot on alloy, and how it was fabricated, let alone whether there were any surface treatments for corrosion protection, etc.

I pers>

Most gunmetal paint I ever used was like the color of pencil graphite with a metallic sheen. Cheers, Max Bryant

"Don Stauffer" wrote

Real gunmetal is an ancient alloy, some sort of bronze I believe.

KL

Correct Kurt, the alloy known as gunmetal is in fact a type of bronze and was used to cast, you guessed it...guns (usually canon but sometimes early handgonnes). Commonly model paints called gunmetal are supposed to represent rust blued steel (as opposed to chemical salt bluing, nitre bluing or Parkerizing).