UH-1D Iroquois 'Huey'

Thanks Paul. Glad you like the jungle foliage, incidentally, apart from the overall look of it as a backdrop, there's a reason it has to be very dense, as I'm intending to conceal a Viet Cong dude in there with an RPG, and he'll be difficult to spot, in order to convey how tricky they were to locate and what a risk RPGs were and indeed still are to choppers, as the US pilots found out in Vietnam, and have continued to find out in more recent conflicts.

He'll be very close to the guys on the ground, who will not see him although I'm hinting in the diorama that the pilot in the right seat might have spotted him, by his pointing finger - the one I keep breaking off! Whether or not the Viet Cong is going to fire and reveal his position is up to the person looking at the diorama to decide. Hopefully there'll be a lot of subtle stuff like that going on with the figures in the finished article.

Had a minor disaster with the Huey a minute ago, but fortunately managed to save it. Since others may be reading this with a view to building one of these kits, and looking for things to watch out for, I'll describe my minor disaster...

As previously noted, the windshield is a nice tight fit, ordinarily this is a good thing with kits, but of course the choice of glue for clear parts is limited if one is to avoid the perspex discolouring when the glue reacts with it, so, as per usual I've been using two part epoxy to fix these bits in place. Also, because it creates a very strong bond, and I've had a model in the past where the windows are seated from inside the body have its windows drop into the model when it was picked up by somebody, and of course it was a real pain to fix. So, on went the epoxy glue and because of the tight fit, there was almost no 'ooze room' for it, which resulted in some smears on the glass interior, and of course that would have looked terrible on such a big part of the model, so I quickly ripped it all apart and washed it in lighter fuel, which thankfully, in combination with tissue paper enabled me to clean all the expoxy off. It also cleaned off my paint on the interior window frame, but that can be redone. Phew!

If you are making this model, I suggest you try either using the special 'no craze' cyano you can buy, or, as I'm going to try, file the window edges a tad looser, to allow a bit of 'glue room'.

While on the subject of things to watch out for, I've also been working on the engine cowling, because there are some sink marks along the top, and the two semicircle halves where the turbine exhaust pipe emeges do not form a particularly great join.

Worth noting too, is the kit offers an alternative part for the air intake dust filters, but does not give any info on which part is relevant for which period you are modelling. So photo reference is not a bad idea, however, the Topshots Photosniper book I have of the UH-1D (which is excellent reference by the way) shows the D model Huey with the later period dust filter most often seen in less dusty European climates, it being a Dornier license-built German Army version. So if you are doing a 'Nam' version, although both types of filter could be seen in that theatre, the type with the horizontal lines on them, as opposed to the metal vertical louvred version, seems to be the more common one seen in Vietnam according to most of my reference pictures of the period.

More pics soon when the windows are back in and the cowling and other bits are on.

 Al

Rivetting stuff..

I've been working on the tweeks necessary before the final fuselage bits and empenage (that's the sticky out wingy bits at the back for you non-aeroplane types) can be affixed.

Hindsight is always 20/20 as the Americans are fond of saying, and in common with many other model kits, it's apparent at the latter stages of construction that one or two parts would have been better and easier to sand down before they went together, had some things been known...

Put together and with the windscreen in place, it becomes obvious when compared to side-view photos of a real Huey, that the skylights appear too recessed, thanks to an overly heavy rendition of the skylight  window frames in this kit. To correct this, some major sanding is needed, and that  means scratching the skylight glass is pretty much unavoidable when doing so. This can be polished up later, but is still a bit annoying as in this case, short of clairvoyancy, there isn't really any way it could have been accurately reprofiled before being constructed, because all the surrounding bits combine to create the roof profile.

On the plus side however, the fact that the perspex got sanded, and will need polishing up again, does kind of put you in the mood to tackle all the rest of the over-zealous rivet detail on this kit (a problem with quite a few large scale Dragon kits in recent years, and reminiscent of that over the top rivet detail you used to get on 1/72nd scale model aeroplane kits all the time when I was a kid).

You can probably make out in the picture above that a fair bit of sanding has been going on to remove that rivetting, because it is rendered all over the bloody thing. I've seen photographs of this kit where the rivet over-detailing has not been addressed (even on builds featured in modelling magazines), and it ruins the look of things, giving a toy-like appearance. In modelling at 1/35, we are of course attempting to emulate the impression of an object viewed from quite a distance away, and comparable photos of Hueys at distance rarely show up much rivet detail. Having studied real Hueys close up too, I know that the rivet detail, while visible, is not the overall impression one gets of the thing unless actually concentrating on noticing it. So it's all got to go, except from the one place on a Huey where it is really noticeable, that being the black anti-dazzle panel on the nose.

I dry fitted the landing skids (which are well detailed on this kit for the most part), but another problem one finds with helicopter model kits much of the time, is caused by  the landing skids. To be accurately scaled, they have to be relatively thin plastic, and these are rarely able to support the weight of a painted and detailed model without bending a bit, so it is fortunate that I have chosen to model this thing 'in flight', which gets around what would otherwise be a problem. Something to bear in mind if you are making one of these.

My decision to model the thing 'in flight' does create a bit of work however. As noted earlier in this blog, the way this kit goes together is mostly very clever in terms of concealing join lines of the parts, making it relatively idiot-proof where getting an accurate shape is concerned, and making 'join lines' not  much of a feature on the top parts of the model, which is good for most people making this kit. If modelled on the ground, the fuselage join line on the bottom of the cabin and tailboom would be hard to see, so a perfect join of the two halves would not be strictly needed, but up in the air, it will be seen, and so quite a bit of sanding and rescribing of panel lines is necessary to get a nice seamless join on the bottom of the Huey.

Of more concern in the accuracy stakes however, are the empenage synchronised elevators, which stick out from either side of the tailboom. These are well modelled themselves, with the correct 'upside down' aerofoil shape of the real thing, but the kit makers have dropped the ball when it comes to how they attach to the tailboom. On the real Huey, these elevators are synchronised to the rotor controls and adjust in pitch to provide the necessary correct tail-down force in flight. As such they are attached, and pivot on, an 'axle' and are ever so slightly clear of the tailboom's skin to allow them to move.

Two problems occur on the kit's rendition of this. First they are fitted courtesy of the typical model plane kit system, of a slot into which a tab on the elevator part is inserted. This results in them fitting flush to the tailboom skin like an aeroplane's wing, rather than appearing free to move. But worse, the parts fail to take into account the taper of the tailboom as it gets thinner towards the back, so if this is not addressed the elevators would end up slightly swept back when viewed from above or below. This is not correct and looked really bad when I dry fitted the part to see whether I could 'get away with it'. Nope.

So, on the real Huey they stick straight out at 90 degrees to the centreline, and since I want this to look like a real Huey, something had to be done about it: I cut off the tabs on the elevator parts, and was going to use these tabs to fill the slot holes on the tailboom, but decided to use filler instead. I then drilled 'axle holes' in the elevator parts and inserted thin wires to serve as axles, in much the same way as one creates armatures for figures when kitbashing adjusted poses. These axles will need to be made larger in diameter by sleeving a collet of  thin tubing over them. But that's easy enough.

I then drilled out a hole through the tailboom, and inserted some larger diameter aluminium tubling to serve as a sleeve for the axles. This is actually very much like how the real mechanism is arranged on a Huey. A bit of Milliput filled up the original slot holes and voila (or viola if you are a musical type), a much improved look, with two advantages. First the elevators can now be adjusted to the correct cant for the phase of flight I am portraying on the diorama, and second, any slight misalignment of the two halves of the fuselage, which might have put the original slot holes out of true, making symmetrical fitting of the elevators tricky, is now no longer an issue, since the sleeve tube goes right through the tailboom, making misalignment impossible.

By the way, that's not blood on the part near the wire in the picture above, I marked things out with a red pen! Notice the as yet unaddressed over the top rivet detail on these bits.

It should be noted that even though I am pointing out faults on this kit and correcting them, on the whole I think this kit is very nice indeed, and the only real shape inaccuracy I have come across is the aforementioned taper of the elevators if not corrected. As you've just read, it's fairly easy to sort out, as indeed are the big rivets providing you have some files and sandaper. So don't let my obsession with accuracy put you off this kit!

 On the skids..

Some pics of the thing coming together. I think the tweek to the elevators was worth the effort, it looks like it breathes a bit more life into the thing to me. Criticisms aside on certain parts of the kit, there is no doubt that the kit definitely builds up into something which looks like what it is supposed to be, and some of the detailing is very good indeed, such as the footstep on the landing skid.

More progress piccies soon.

Al

The scores on the doors...

One of the wierd things about this kit is the doors. On a UH-1D there are six doors, the two pilot's doors, the two big cabin sliding doors, and two auxiliary doors just behind the pilot's doors which the main cabin doors meet when they slide shut. And each one of the three pairs of doors is modelled in a different way for some inexplicable reason.

The pilot's doors are simply moulded as part of the fuselage, with a hole where the glazing is added, which is a bit of a bummer if you wanted them open, as it would require some serious surgery. The main cabin doors are a separate part, with the glazing as a part which you add in a similar fashion to the pilot's doors. This means they can be positioned open or shut, but if positioned shut, they would require some detail adding, as the interior of the doors lacks any detailing, and would be visible through the windows of the opposite door. Positioned open, the inner face is flat against the side of the fuselage, and therefore not visible. Then there are the small hinged auxiliary doors. Bizarrely, these are molded entirely from clear plastic, which is an advantage in terms of not having to glue in separate glazing, but seems odd in that the other doors were not rendered in that fashion, or that these doors were not rendered in the same fashion as the others. Why the difference?

Like the main cabin doors, the small auxiliary doors were removable on a real Huey, and this was invariably done to save weight, since a helicopter's perfomance degrades considerably in hotter, thinner air. Removing the doors also offered some welcome ventilation in SE Asian climes and allowed troops to embark and disembark faster too. Being thin aluminium, they offered next to no protection against gunfire, so were not really missed. However, when transporting and treating patients in flight, it was sometimes advantageous to be out of a draught, so the doors were often retained on medevac Hueys, which rarely carried huge numbers of people and did not often have to cope with the additional weight of ammunition and weapons.

So, being a medevac chopper, my model will have all the doors on it, and this means a bit more work is required on the auxiliary doors, as they too are bereft of interior detailing, and with the main cabin doors in the locked open position, which is how I will portray the thing, the interior face of the auxiliary doors will be visible through the cabin. The real Huey's auxiliary doors have pressed metal reinforcerments on the interior part, and these could be added with plastic card, but it would be a little bit fiddly to create them and risky to glue them in place without marring the window part, so I decided to try a lazier way of depicting the detail, that of simply painting it on them - they have to be painted on the inside anyway, since they are clear plastic.

To add the detail, I first painted the inside of the door matt white (missing out the window part of course) then I drew the reinforced pressed steel parts on with a fine tipped permanent ink pen, and added fake shadows with the pen too. I then painted a light coat of flat white over the pen drawing to tone it down, and then smudged reddish 'Nam dust' coloured chalk pastel into the lot to 'muck it up a bit'.

I think they turned out pretty well, and I'll post some pictures when I have some decent light so you can either agree or disagree - the camera I have at the moment is not great for anything other than daylight shots, having lent my good camera to somebody - which reminds me, I must get that back actually!

Al

Pics...

On the pic above you can see how the green dry-brushing of the figures has simulated the light coming down on them through the roof skylights.

Below you can see the painted detail on the opposite side cabin auxiliary door, when the crew in the cabin are added this will only be partially visible, so I think it is more than enough detail, but certainly worth doing in comparison to leaving the interior of the door bare. You can see on the nearer auxiliary door where the pen used to create this detail has bled through the white paint on the inside of the door, which of course will not be visible when the things gets sprayed olive drab.

I also painted up and dry-brushed the rotor mast. I've seen this part come in for some criticism in a few reviews of this kit, but I think it's actually fairly accurately modelled when compared to decent pictures as long as the mould seams are cleaned off it. I painted this with flat aluminium enamel, dry-brushed it quite heavily with flat black, then lightly dry-brushed it with Metal Cote 27002, and retouched the rubber gaiter in with flat black again. This gives it a slightly vague oily metal look, which is what I wanted, since I will be modelling the rotors as though they are in motion with some severe surgery to them, consequently, the rotor mast and pushrods need to look a bit blurred.

More soon.

Al

Fiddly bits

Started gluing the 'sticky out' bits on (to use the technical term). This is where the kit's instruction sheet falls down a bit and the magnifying glass on the pictures rides to the rescue. Fortunately I have a lot of reference for the Huey, which is just as well since the placement of several parts is not at all well explained by the line drawings on the instruction sheet and in some cases is downright unhelpful. In many cases there is no attempt to provide any kind of locating pins to aid in placement of the parts either.

In common with other parts of the chopper where you get several options of what to include, the instructions offer no guidance as to what bits you should either glue on or leave off based on what year or even which armed force you are trying to depict. This is not such a problem when you have a lot of reference books, but it would be a problem for anyone without these, especially since if you add all of the antennas and accessories, such as the cable cutters and VHF antennas and pitot tubes, you would end up with something that looked like a wierd hybrid of several models, or some kind of surveillance helicopter with a bizarre mix of duplicated systems rather than the '1st Air Cavalry'  version of a UH-1D which the box proclaims the kit is of.

So if you are making this kit, you'll need some decent pics of the exact bird you want. All credit to them for providing a multitude of options for various versions, but 'nil point' for not providing any explanation of what to use for which variant. As it stands, there are a huge amount of spare antennas and such left on the sprues which will not be required for the model I'm making. This is not the only issue with 'sticky out bits' either....

Whilst the tail stinger bump stop for this kit is very well modelled interms of its profile, it's not well modelled in how it fits into the tailboom. Using the kit's method for attaching this part would not only leave a non-existent (on the real thing) lug in plain view (there to stop the part disappearing into the locating hole), but would also result in the part actually projecting at completely the wrong angle. Instead of the kit's simple locating hole, the real thing has a channel into which the sprung stinger tailskid seats, which allows it to move against a sprung stop to absorb the shock of a tail strike when landing.

Happily this is easily corrected by trimming the offending lug off the stinger part and filing a groove into the back of the tailboom where the original locating hole is, and then inserting the stinger into this groove at the correct angle based on photographic reference, where it is easily secured with a trickle of superglue.

The chopper is basically finished now apart from the Medic and Crew chief yet to be added and details I will attach after it has been painted, such as the windscreen wipers and scratchbuilt rotor blades, so I'll shortly be painting the thing and sticking some pictures of the thing on this thread.

Al