Thank you. I bookmarked it. There’s a lot of interesting color variations on those samples in the photos.
Note that one of the links is to a source that analyzed the ‘true’ Russia iron analytically) and found the surface coating to be primarily an iron carboNITRIDE, something which received considerable scientific analysis nearly a century later as nitrogen-ion implantation in iron became a subject of interest. This certainly suggests there may be a similarity between the Russia iron surface appearance and some forms of contemporary case hardening – and that some experimentation directly on polished iron surfaces might provide the ‘correct’ appearance of properly-made planished iron.
Interestingly there is a Russian patent (4,163,680, Syrchikov et al. 1979) that seems to indicate the effect can be created by hot-rolling sheet iron in an appropriate controlled atmosphere of ammonium carbamate. That might be something that could be tried at hobby level…
My memory is wrong. The bottle of the bluish Gun Metal is not as old as I thought it was. Floquil gun metal is part number 110108.
You can see, one of them is metallic blue, the other is more like steel.
Does this look like Russian Iron to you?
-Kevin
The Micro Scale Floquil ‘equivalent’ table gives TS38 (a Tamiya spray-can color) as the replacement of choice for ‘Gunmetal’.
I’d like to see someone make up both flat swatches and painted ‘boiler jackets’ (or similar cylindrical objects) with both these paints and see how they look.
Cool. I’m still doing some research on the colors of these engines, but I think that might work. I’ll have to keep an eye out for that. Thank you for that information, Kevin.