What colour should the wheels the Canon be painted in?

[Vane]

There are some details on my ships that I really have a hard time to decide if/what colour it should be painted in. And when i look into various buildlogs, people seem to do it very differently.  One is for example the Canon wheels.  Should it be no colour, black or the same as the carriage? Do anyone has some guidance rules?

 

My models are Granado, Diana and Victory but I guess this will always be än issue to decide.

[GrandpaPhil]

I did mine the same as the carriages with black around the outside of the wheel to simulate the iron banding.

Edited September 2, 2019 by GrandpaPhil

[mtaylor]

I wouldn't paint the outside that rolls on the deck.  Iron banded wheels wouldn't have been used as they chewed up the deck.  If it's a ship with the iron tracks on the deck then the wheels would have been iron also.

[GrandpaPhil]

Oops.  I did not think of that.

[Vane]

Anyone knows how this should be done in a correct way and not just by preference?

[Beef Wellington]

I'm not sure there is an absolutely correct answer to this question, I wondered myself many times, and I'm sure varied according to period, trends and fashions.  I do enjoy looking at the many examples of contemporary models, but these typically do not tend to show model with cannon, but where they do they appear to be both red carriages and wheels in the 18 century/Royal Navy category.  Who knows, this may also have been modelers whimsy, my own choice was to go with red wheels, but that was simply because I felt that anything else would have just looked too busy within the context of the model.  Nice thing (or not so nice depending on your preference) is that leaving unpainted allows you to show some other details like the bolts in the wheels (Blue Ensign has a really good example of this in his wonderful Pegasus build)

 

There are 3 current physical examples on historical RN ships (Victory, Tricomalee and Unicorn), and the USS Constitution.  I don't think any of these could be considered to be contemporaneous:

HMS Victory - yellow ochre carriages, wooden wheels

Trincomalee (slightly later period) - red carriages, black wheels

Frigate Unicorn - unpainted carriages and wheels, these are relatively recent additions to the ship to make it a more interesting visitor attraction and I'm not sure how much thought was put into period accuracy

USS Constitution - red (more salmon pink) carriages and black wheels - this is probably the least contemporaneous as the ship reflects her state after later rebuilds.