Henry,
I can remember being in my Dad's truck rebuild shop at Raritan Arsenal in the mid fifties, and watching the various vehicles roll off the line. Every one was a slightly different hue of OD. Later on in life, during my active army service, I would walk down the line in a motor pool and see the same thing. I also note that trucks are made up of parts from a hundred or more manufacturers, each of which does its best to coat the product with the correct shade of OD. If you jump into a brand new truck, say an M35, the bodywork will be one color, the steering wheel another, the light switch yet another, and so on. If you're adding stuff at unit level, such as fording kits and heaters, the kit parts will display the same variations in paint,both from kit to truck, and from kit to kit. The specs for OD paint may permit this, or the color is not checked when the part comes through. I'm not sure what the explanation of it is, but anyone who has ever bought a quantity of NOS parts can !
see the same. One unit I got as
signed to in the sixties was drawing brand new M35a2's, m151's, and rebuilt M37's, and no two trucks were exactly the same in daylight. In lower light levels, the difference became less apparent though. That's the wonder of OD. The truck almost disappears in the dark. I don't think the Army was interested in what exact hue the paint was, but rather in its light scattering and nonreflective properties, along with corrosion resistance. When it came to spot painting for rust control, the drivers were given unlabeled or at least unbranded spraycans of OD. It was common for different cans to spray different colors, and different degrees of reflectivity, and NO can matched the base truck colors.
As the vehicles aged, each one took on its own unique look, and you could spot a particular vehicle from a distance if you were familiar with it. I always thought this had more to do with how the truck was used, how dirty it got between washings, and how hard it was scrubbed. They used street brooms and brown bristle toilet brushes to get the mud off of them at the wash rack, and it really bit into the paint. The trucks that got light clean duty had better looking paint, and stayed that nice uniform flat OD longer. The ones that got daily hard scrubbings turned varying shades of color and flatness. One truck in particular that I remember must have had a primer problem, because it looked like it had been in a paintball storm. It was more spot paint than base coat. Perhaps the driver was just compulsive?
It's not odd that canvas colors also varied by the same amounts or worse.
BTW, this same thing is found in military aircraft, as my air cav unit's Hueys were widely varying colors of OD, even when new. We had one project that called for replacing the air intake screens and cowlings on some ships, and the base color of the fuselage was a non-uniform semigloss brownish OD, while the cowling kits were all a bright olive green dead flat color. It looked silly as hell for a long time before the sun and dirt worked at that paint and lessened the differences.
I haven't heard anyone compare genuine surplus OD paint with the same spec color from a civilian source. I know from experience that 24087 from military channels is NOT the same color or flatness as that from one of the popular civilian suppliers. When you think about it, if you were making the paint, what would YOU use as a color sample? No matter what standard you used, everything already in the field is going to be diferent. Maybe it doesn't really matter as much as we carry on about.
Interesting subject as always!
Best regards,
Jack
>>In a message dated Sun, 15 Apr 2001 10:59:49 AM Eastern Daylight Time, "Henry J. Fackovec" <fackovec@radiotech.com> writes:
<< Hey all:
ten paragraphs of carefully scribed paint comments ruthlessly snipped here....
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue May 01 2001 - 07:42:40 PDT