Hi all,
I finally finished my Italeri UH-1D "Slick" that I picked up last month. This was actually the first chopper I had ever built. I picked it up to be a retirement gift for my boss. She had been among the Army's early female chopper pilots and has a particular fondness for the Huey, so it seemed an obviuos choice. Due to time constraints, I planned to build it as much as I could out of the box. Unfortunately the kit has a bunch of problems, so it entailed a lot more work, and more importantly time, than what I was expecting out of a 1/72 kit. Fortunately, everything really came together last weekend, so I was able to finish it with a day to spare!
The kit came with gunship rockets and mini-guns which has been pointed out are not correct for Army 1D's, so I scratchbuilt the door guns out of a variety of Evergreen styrene sheet and rod. They are a tad overscale and a bit clunky, but the chopper looks a lot better with them than without.
The kit also lacked seatbeats, so I cut some from painted paper. They don't show up well in a lot of the photos, but once crinkled and laid over the seats, I think they look reasonably plausible, and a lot better than having nothing.
Italeri didn't have anything to hold the doors to the fuselage when in the opened position. Because the doors needed to be forced against the fuselage, I was afaid that if I simply tried to glue them in place, they might pop off under tension. So I used a pieces of wire, drilled through the fuselage to make the door clips in the back that look semi-close and be structurally sound as well.
Most of the windows had clarity issues. The thick edges of the winshield were extremely prominent, so I did quite a bit of sanding, polishing, and coating with Future. Like the seat belts, the result is not perfect, but was a big improvement on doing nothing. I used Tamiya Clear Green mixed with Future for the upper windows.
The kit was a challenge to build well. Aside from the decals which were excellent, just about everything was a bit of a fight, but with some TLC, it made a decent looking Huey. My boss was thrilled with it, and her reaction really made the effort worthwhile.
Andy
More photos may be found here:
http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v624/ABARNE/Huey%20UH-1D%201-72/