Stick it with S...lurry
These tales of bovine deposits ... long ago I was apprenticed to an airfield manager of the old school. It came to pass that the Air Ministry Inspector was to conduct the annual inspection of the airfield, which required the renewal of runway markings.
Half a century before all this eco-friendly stuff, and to his great puzzlement, the then Iuvenaviator was despatched with high-tech barrow and shovel to collect five buckets of dung from the cattle which then grazed the rented spaces between the runways of our impecunious flying club, while the boss collected two bags of lime from the builders' merchant.
Lime, dung and a dozen packets of washing blue (kids, don't even ask) were added to a 40-gallon drum from which the end had been laboriously chiselled, then filled with water. The pale green mix was then stirred with a fence post. And stirred and stirred. No prizes for guessing who did the stirring. The mixture was then painted by yard brush over the existing runway numbers. The first 22-04 weren't too bad, but by the time we finished the 30ft long 09-27 my shoulders were aching, and I wondered aloud whether the boss had wasted my time, for the smelly mess might not stick at all.
Big mistake. An hour with hosepipe, brush and two-tone Aztec with khaki lower half demonstrated that cow dung is indeed superbly adhesive. The sparkling lime-dung runway numbers lasted easily for a year, but by then Cherokee had met Cow in expensive union, giving me a mainplane replacement to add to my engineering logbook. Meanwhile the club funds must have improved, for next year we used white emulsion paint. And without cattle, the Aztec stayed sparkling white.