I've pretty much decided to paint the aircraft in the Golden Hawks scheme. The Golden Hawks were a Royal Canadian Air Force F-86 Sabre formation display team. Their paint scheme looked great on an F-86, and I'm pretty sure that it will look super on an RV-8.

Read on for more.


On 17 Oct 00 I visited the National Aviation Museum in Ottawa. They have a Golden Hawks Sabre in their collection (1st picture), but unfortunately it is on loan to another museum. I visited their research library, and they were extremely helpful. I was given copies of the official Royal Canadian Air Force drawings of the paint scheme, complete with Dupont paint numbers for most of the colours. I visited a Dupont autobody paint shop, and the old paint numbers still worked. The gold colour was actually a gold coloured powder mixed with clear lacquer. The manufacturer of the powder still makes gold paints, so hopefully they can give me some info on the colour so I can match it. If all else fails I'll match it by eyeball.



The archivist at the library also tracked down an article in a plastic modelling magazine that gave the details of all the variations in the paint scheme over the years, including which aircraft tail numbers wore each variant of the scheme. Thanks Ian!