Started on this heli yesterday.
It's the Revell 41st anniversary kit, I bought it when I was looking for parts to spruce up my Jolly Green, and I was getting impatient whilst waiting for a Fujimi SH-3 kit to arrive. I ended up using the Fujimi kit as a donor for parts for the Jolly Green and this one has remained in it's box untouched, until yesterday. I could probably build the Fujimi SH-3 also but it'd be missing a cockpit interior, I can use the main rotor from the Jolly Green, or swap it back for the one I borrowed from the Fujimi SH-3, and the ice shield from this Revell kit as those were the only parts I used from the Fujimi SH-3...
It's been an easy kit to build so far, and it's nearly finished in terms of building it, only took me 3-4 hours yesterday. Just need to grind/file off the air defense port thingies on the rear of the fuselage (that thing just behind the big door on one side) and add some vanes and stuff to it. I want to use my dremel to do that, on slow speed, but I'm also a little hesitant over doing so as I I'm wary of overdoing it and going through the plastic, or obscuring more detail than necessary...
I've been held up by lack of matt black paint though, if I had it yesterday I could have sprayed the interior, put the windows in and coated them with future ready for masking with Eduard masks, sealed the fuselage up and added all the little vanes and bits and glued the radome on and the model would be ready for painting...
I'm not 100% sure of what extra parts to use (like the vanes on the underside) as apparently you can make many variants of the Sea King with this kit and I don't know which variant the RAF SAR Sea Kings are generally so I'll be making this as an approximation with oob parts - I'm not a rivet counter.
I'll be painting this as an RAF SAR heli, so it should be nice and easy, spray white (maybe over a grey primer), then yellow (I bought the correct yellow when I bought the kit). I have the decals from the Airfix RAF SAR heli to use on this bird.
And this one will look much better than the ESCI UH-1D and HH-3E Jolly Green than I've done (well almost done the HH-3E) because I'm sealing it up, instead of trying to magnetise the two halves of the fuselage so I can put in some mechanical parts - financial road blocks have meant I don't even have those parts and I'm unlikely to either...
The floor of the interior is a bit warped unfortunately, can't recall if it came like that but over the last year it's obviously ended up like that in the box. Hopefully I can do something about that when I glue it into the fuselage.
Only bit of "custom" work I've done on this helo is to cut out the furthest aft windows so I can put in the bubble windows as per RAF SAR birds. Very easily done and I was surprised I didn't mess it up - just took a 2mm drill, drilled some holes in each corner, cut with a knife between the holes and then filed the plastic so it's square. Upon initial test fitting of the bubble windows they do seem a little more recessed than the other windows but they should look fine.
I've left the wheels off on purpose btw, just in case anyone is wondering. I found with my Jolly Green on Sunday that I should not have attached the wheels as it made painting the struts they go onto more difficult. The wheels will be painted on the sprue, clipped off, refinished in the spots where they were attached to the sprue and then glued on when I've painted the rest of the undercarriage.
