CF-105 Avro Arrow - colours and markings

[Glenn S]

First things first, I was raised with the story that all the plans for the Avro Arrow were destroyed when the Arrow project was cancelled. I believed that story until I recently opened the Hobby Craft 1/48 scale Avro Arrow box and found a set of the plans for the Arrow. They seem much more simple than I had been led to believe.
All joking aside, I'm building a 1/48 scale Avro Arrow for my neighbour and I am at the stage where the model is painted white and ready to move on to painting the red parts of the wings, tail and fuselage. The problem I'm having is that I can't seem to find any definative references for what colour red/orange was used on the Arrow. Reference photos online, and in books, have proven not to be very useful since the red/orange colour looks different under different lighting and photo exposures.
As the proud new owner of a growing collection of various companies bottles/jars of red and orange paints I can honestly say that I haven't found any paint that seems to match any of the good quality colour photos of the Avro Arrow.
I suspect I'm not the first to run onto this problem. Any help that anyone could provide on answering the following questions would be appreciated:

• Does anyone have any definitive insight on the real colour of red/orange that was used on the Arrows?
• Any recommendations on a Vallejo paint, or mixture of paints, that would match the colour found on the real plane? And,
• does anyone have a reference for the stenciling used on the Arrow?

Any help would be appreciated.

P.S. I haven't painted a kit with so much white paint since I built a 1/32 US Navy Phantom when I was in my teens. Almost hard to believe that I painted that kit with 1/4" Testors, white plastic handled paint brush.

 

[Glenn S]

I finished the kit a couple of days ago and handed it off to my neighbour yesterday. So, after spending over 30 years in the box on a shelf in his basement, the completed kit now moves one room over to the family room to be on display.
I have to admit that, for such a simple kit it ended up being a challenge to build. I built it right out of the box and resisted the urge to start detailing it.
One of the biggest challenges was that I couldn't find a lot of good reference photos. There are a fair number of photos online, but most of them seem to be repeats of the same four or five views of the aircraft.
The other issue I ran into was that the first prototype "RL 201" flew for about two years before it was sent to the wreckers. In that time it seems like the AVRO paint shop spent all their time changing the paint scheme. I don't think any of the six Arrow prototypes were painted the same.
In the end I went with the livery it wore at the end of its life (as best as I can tell).
I tried a pin wash on the underside, but the panel lines were so wide that it made the model look like a cheap toy, so I removed all the pin wash and went with a clean look. I did the mental math and the panel lines would have been about 4" wide on the real airplane if the model was to scale.
Speaking of scale, the real Arrow must have been huge for a fighter. The 1/48 scale Arrow is about the same size as a 1/32 scale F-18 that I'm working on. I've included a photo of the Arrow beside a Bird Dog for reference purposes.
In the end it was fun to be able to build a piece of Canadian modelling history.

 

[Tommergun]

Daaaaang, that's stunning. Great work!

 

[wjbrandel]

Good work. I like the paint on it

 

[BarleyBop]

My dad would have just shook his head, "another great Canadian innovation relegated to the bin and forgotten... probably because it was too good for its time"

Lotsa history, controversy and cover-ups, but a great build!

 

[VegasAWACER13]

Very cool.