UH-1D Iroquois 'Huey'

Rivet counting...

Although most people regard rivet counting as a derogatory term, I have actually been indulging in some on this model, because of the amount of spurious ones it contains which are not to be found on the real thing, along with some panels and vents which don't seem to be on the real thing either!

I don't intend to get too obsessive with it, but some of the more obvious fantasy ones have had to go, and there are one or two other corrections which need to be made too, notably the position of the mesh vents on the engine cowling - these are molded on, and although I'm cutting out the vents and replacing them with mesh, as it stands, they are actually incorrectly placed and slightly the wrong shape too, so I'll be filling them in, rescribing the position of the vents and then cutting my own new ones in the correct position and shape. I've also removed the molded on door hinges and door handles, which will be scratchbuilt instead, as the door handle will look better in three dimensions and the hinges were not particularly accurately shaped.

There was some other interior detailing missing from the space between the cockpit and the main cabin, namely two dirty great big girder bulkheads with lightening holes in them, which on the real thing are in line with the rear of the pilot's seats, so I made those from plastic card, which was a bit tricky since they fit flush against a compound curve on the interior cabin, and are a tight squeeze too, but they're in there now and look okay, you can see these on the picture below:

You might also just be able to make out on the above picture that the interior has had the door shut lines scribed in and rescribed on the outside, and some of the spurious rivet detail which was alongside the pilot's window frame has been removed. Another error on the interior, yet to be corrected, is the top of the two girder stanchions I made: In reality, these curve inwards at the top of the cabin where they meet the roof, and the quilted sound deadening material comes down onto them a little, where it is marked with the location of a first aid kit by a red cross and some stencilling, so that needs to go in too.

Al

Tarting it up...

Lots of minor details need to be added before the fuselage halves are fixed together, and I have started putting these in. The glazing for the pilot's doors has been added, and the doors and surrounding cockpit area have been painted flat black prior to some further minor details:

On the above shot you can see some stencilling for the emergency release has been touched in with a brush and yellow acrylic. This would be too small to read in reality so just hinting at it with a fine brush is enough. When the glazing's glue has dried, it will be painted over on the insides of the window frames and minor door details added. The glazing is secured with two-part epoxy glue so as to avoid the whitening discolouration effect which polystyrene cement and superglue have on clear plastic.

Here you can see where I have begun detailing the cabin roof, most of this will only be visible in silhouette, so things such as radio wires and map lights will be added plus some additional wiring. The wire which is hanging down is made from .010 gauge electric guitar string, which has been coiled around a small wire and then painted black:

On the main cabin walls, I began adding the prominent ring pulls which, on the real Huey, are attached to various removable section panels on the sound deadening material in order that interior inspection hatches can be accessed:

The ring pulls were made from aluminium tubing, cut up into tiny lengths with a scalpel. Most of the access hatches and plug points in the roof of the Huey's main cabin have small flaps of sound deadening material press-studded over them, so a good deal of extra quilted material is required to emulate this. Again, I made this from Milliput, which will be cut up in to the required sizes:

More later...

Al

To be fair Ian, I'm being a really picky sod, simply because this blog is so in-depth in comparison to most. You also have to bear in mind that the Huey is one of my absolute favourite machines in the entire world - if I won the lottery, I honestly would buy one to put in my back garden - so what bothers me might not necessarily bother someone else. And if I'm completely honest, I'd much rather have this kit available, with a few errors, than there be no kit of the thing at all. I think it's great that there is a 1/35 scale kit of it which allows us to do so much with decent military model figures in dioramas.

Of the problems I've listed, yes the 'dashboard' does fit poorly and should be off to one side a bit, and yes the pilot figures don't fit in the seats particularly well, but neither of these is insurmountable for a modeler equipped with a few decent needle files. Everything else I've listed, such as the vents being slightly wrong and the rivets being not totally accurate are pretty 'rivet-counter'-ish. and the slight lack of detail in certain areas offers the chance to make some stuff for yourself and exercise a bit of the modeler's art. After all, if the kit was easy to make look absolutely spot on, there would be nothing impressive about making it up into the finished article, would there? The main thing is that its overall shape is good and that it does generally look a lot like what it is supposed to be.

There are a lot of good things about the kit too, the windows for example are very nicely modeled and fit very well indeed, with commendably clear molding. I read a review somewhere that slagged them off a bit, claiming that they scaled out to measure the equivalent of four inches thick, that's absolute nonsense, I think whoever wrote that needs to buy a new rule. There are also some details I've never seen added to any other model of a Huey in any scale (including a 1/24th scale one I built once), such as the baggage compartment in the tailboom and the correctly-shaped 'tailstinger' skid. The plastic it is molded from (very cleanly I might add - another plus point) is quite soft, which makes removing rivets and other things one might want to change quite simple. For the most part the instructions are very clear too, and if one wasn't really 'going for it' in the detail department, I bet it could be finished in a couple of evenings quite easily.

So don't be too put off by my comments, I'll be the first to admit I'm being obsessive about this one, and built straight from the box it would look pretty good. It's the fact that I'm researching the hell out of the thing that is making the build quite slow and methodical, and not the kit presenting masses of problems.

Al

A picture of obsession...

Just to prove how picky I am being Ian, I took this snap of my desk...

That's a laptop with the Airmobile movie We Were Soldiers DVD playing, four reference books on the Huey, plus numerous other 'Nam' references books all over the place...

And just to prove that it does indeed look like a Huey, here it is dry fitted together:

Taking it on the chin...

Added the cabling detail to the chin window areas and put some avionics boxes in the nose to prevent the 'see through' look it would otherwise have without them. You can see some of the added wiring on this shot:

Another wire needs adding to this part at a later stage, this one will protrude through the bottom of the helicopter's chin window corner and is (I think) a copper overflow drainage tube from the battery in the avionics compartment. It comes through the lightening holes in the front former and exits through the small rectangular block at the bottom corner of the chin window frame, which you can see adjacent to where the two white cables disappear under the tail rotor pedals. A hole will have to be drilled for that..

Also added, but not visible on this shot, is an extension to my modified cockpit coaming and an extension to the lower central cockpit console. Both these were necessary because I shifted the position of the coaming and panel to more accurately reflect their position in the real thing, doing that meant that there would have been a gap visible if looking forward down the windshield, so the coaming extension prevents that and also stops light shining down into the avionics bay and lighting it up too much, which would obviously not be the case on the real thing either.

As a result of my screwing around with all that, I decided not to use the decal for the intrument panel, and instead painted the instruments in on the coaming front, without using the panel part from the kit. I think that looks better than the decal, and to some extent the decal would not be correct on my modified panel, since it is designed for use with the unmodified part.

Al

Little bang theory...

Cheers for the advice Spurty, although I suspect that if the tiny figures start telling me to go out and kill people with a sniper rifle, that would be when it would really become a problem...

Continuining the 'I'm too cheap to buy stuff' scatchbuilding odyssey, I've been making 1/35 scale M-18 smoke grenades. One is definitely needed for the smoke which will be deployed on the road in front of the landing chopper on the diorama, but most Hueys in combat in Vietnam tended to have a few of these grenades taped to the seat supports in the rear cabin for handy use by the door gunners, or in the case of my unarmed medevac, the crew chief and medic.

I'm not sure if you can actually buy 1/35 scale M18 grenades anywhere, but since forum member Tom Anderson came up trumps with a few really good pictures of these grenades for me from his Vietnam days, I decided to make them myself, here they are in progress, and you can probably tell from the aluminium tubing and cocktail sticks in this picture, how they are made:

They still need the pin and the firing handle lever adding, but they need to be painted up first before those can be added.

Al 

Some fantastic detailing going on there Alan!

Great work!

Stuart

Most of which probably won't even be seen LOL But what the hell eh? I'm having fun.

Fire in the hole...

Grenades with a bit of paint and the firing handle added, still got a bit of work to do on these, but they are shaping up:

The real M18 grenade looks like this:

Al

Yeah, but YOU know it's there....

Stuart