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Looking for a thinner 45 Font for decals


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2 hours ago, Spectre711 said:

Do you think that was used in the later 40s?

My kit decals look like 45s but that doesn't mean they are correct either.

 

I don't know whether the Navy font that we know now was used in the late forties, but generally it looks like the 60 degree Navy font to me. I agree the stroke looks a bit thinner, I see two options:

 

- the white fuselage , especially in full sunshine like your second photo, makes the stroke of the black lettering look a tiny bit smaller. I only know the Dutch word for this (overstralen), and it's so obscure that I cannot find a translation. It means that the strong light from the white surrounding the black eats away a bit of the black lettering. Note the difference between your first and second photos - the later has a lot more 'overstralen'. I'm sure there's an English word for it.

 

- just maybe the painter used a different grid compared to the official one, that is 6 x 4.5 blocks with 1 grid block stroke. If he used say 8 x 6 with a 1 stroke, you would get a 'thinner' font. I played around with these effects on my Lockheed U-2 (https://robdebie.home.xs4all.nl/models/u2.htm) and Douglas A-1E (https://robdebie.home.xs4all.nl/models/a1e.htm) pages.

 

Rob

 

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The block letters on that Navy Dakota are definitely the 60-degree corner standard that is still specified in today's Navy/USMC aircraft marking spec. It has been in constant use since the late 1950s.

 

None of the photos you posted show aircraft from the late 1940s (check the trucks in the background) - but to answer your question, there was a wider variety of styles in use during those years. Some of the modex numbers as applied to aircraft of that period (such as the Guardian, Albatros etc.) are painted in styles pretty similar to today's standard, some of them are not.

 

Keep in mind that computer-cut masks are barely a 30-35 year old practice, and all lettering was applied by hand prior to that - so you will see a wide variation in stroke width, and even character proportions. For a personal project to depict the markings on the R4Ds you posted, you should be able to use font representations of the current 60-degree standard and you will get close enough. For a commercial decal sheet, I definitely would have tweaked the stroke widths.

Edited by KursadA
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23 hours ago, KursadA said:

The block letters on that Navy Dakota are definitely the 60-degree corner standard that is still specified in today's Navy/USMC aircraft marking spec. It has been in constant use since the late 1950s.

 

Thanks for the information KursadA.  The Testors/Italeri instruction just say post WWII so I assumed it was late 40s.  I really dont know how correct the decals are since I've never seen a photo of the aircraft looking like this.

 

Testors%20871%20C-47gd+.JPG

Edited by Spectre711
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