Hi mate. Nope, never heard of the procedure but it makes a lot of sense. The dio wasn't really planned - after my 2yr old daughter knock the Spitfire off the bench, the undercarriage broke. I scratchbuilt to fix it. When she was 3 she played with it and broke it again. Well, she's 4 now and I decided to make a dio with it rather than toss the model.
In fact, the only research I did was to see if they ever had metal props on Spitfires (cause I bent them around for the crash scene).
Cheers!