Search and Rescue Group Build 2011

bsyamato

Actually no Norseman in the stash but post some more picture , the colors are great on this one

'Green & Gold!' Fans of the CFL (Canadian Football League) know Saskatchewan Roughrider fans are nothing short of fanatical! How else can a Province with the smallest population host a pro football team? 

I was saving the pictures for later, because you asked here are a few more:

Nice shots again

where's my seabat  

I've made a start on my Alaskan Air Command  1/72 HH-3E  ;

I cut open the side fuselage door and glued some 2mm plastic strip around the opening to make up for the saw cut and filing .

Next I cut the top off an old CD case to use as the cabin floor ;

I found a spare instrument  consol panel to replace the rather ordinary one Lindberg supply along with some control sticks for the cockpit .

I then made some troop seat backs from masking tape and attached it to some plastic strip ;

The seat bases are from the UH-1 Huey spares box .

I then glued the rotors to the hub and painted them along with the tail rotors and some green tint on the canopy . The cabin seats I painted red and I found some pilots to use which I'll give them a fresh coat of paint . The sponsons are glued and clamped as well as the external fuel tanks .

I glued the fuselage windows in place and next I'll start glueing the interior bits into position , take a pic and close up the fuselage halves .

I'm aiming to complete this little project by New Years , it would be a nice change for me to start and finish a build in a week to ten days instead of having projects dragging on for months , like my other on-going builds.

Thank's for looking ;

                               John .

A little more progress ...

All the interior bits are glued in place and I'm ready to close up the fuselage halves .

                               John .

Helo magnific detail work

It's the same lindberg kit i have? it's a snap fit?

Yes , it is the snap-fit kit .

I glued my fuselage halves together , I needed a little tamiya putty across the top of the fuselage ;

Other than that the fit is not too bad .

                    John .

Some more progress , she's starting to look like a helicopter ;

There is a small gap under the front canopy where it meets the fuselage , that I will have to fix with some plastic strip ;

I was looking around the net for pic's of my Alaskan HH-3E and saw a photo of an Alaskan CH-3E with those fixed main landing gear struts . I wondered how difficult it would be to try and scratch build some as an alternative to the large sponsons /main landing gear ;

I think it looks okay for a first try , it may work out on a second build , so I'll think about it for a while .

Anyway I'll fix the gap under the canopy on my current build .

                                  John .

Helo H-34,

You are a modeling machine! Excellent work detailing the non existent interior of the Snap-tite kit. 

I managed some progress at a club 'Build afternoon & dinner' Will post some WIP's before 2012!

so omany details on this old kit helo great start on scratching new gears.

'Its not the beginning of the end yet it is the end of the beginning' ~ W.C.

To me progress is not in leaps and bounds but in small tweaks and added details. Here is what has been done thus far:

The WASP radial engine was molded in one part. After some debate I decided it could be improved. The cooling fins, fuel line and push rods were scraped off using a #11 & #22 hobby blade. Thin wire was wrapped around each with a exit hole foe the fuel line at the top. The fuel manifold was drilled to accept the lines yet I found the holes were not lining up so they were just cut to mate. The push rods are yet to be added. Small bolt heads were added around the inner housing by adding them with stem through pre drilled holes.

The plastic floor was replaced with wood. Bent staples are CA glued from underneath to become seat mounts. The walls were thinned anticipating frame work yet the reference pictures show thicker insulated walls. Sheet styrene was fit to the wall, windows cut and to be filed to a closer tolerance.

The plan is to drop windows in after painting using the interior sheet as a sill, it will eliminate masking as the windows were to be replaced with thinner material. Because of the simple flat shapes it should be a easy fit. I know its not the usual procedure yet somewhat of a new approach.

Suppressionfire , excellent work on the engine detail and I think your idea about making sills for the fuselage windows to sit against is awesome . I will definitly remember that technique for the future , it certainly will save time not having to mask them prior to airbrushing .... "Great Tip"

I came across of a couple of pic's last night while looking around the net and stumbled onto this site ;

http://www.rotorheadsrus.us/documents/231.html

CH-3E 69-05811 Blair Lakes , Alaska 1974

CH-3E 67-14718 NKP Thialand 1969-1970

Mmmm ; "Crazy Legs" . Maybe two more builds on the horizon !

                      John .

Helo H-34,

Thanks, like the Kung-Fu master asked:

'What is the best technique?'

No technique! ~ Bruce Lee

Always think outside the box, the next great technique is just imagination & effort away. Of course it didn't happen without a picture and excellent results.

The proof being in the pudding I have never tried nor heard of 'window sill' technique, will see eventually if its worth the effort.

Speaking of out host with the most... Ask him to update the roll call on page 1 if ya' see him @ the LHS!

I got the HH-3E all masked and started some preliminary airbrushing ;

A little silver on the landing gear struts . wheels and wheel wells , which is what Wolfpak's decal and painting instructions suggest . Also a couple of coats of flat black on the canopy frame lines , so when you look through the canopy you will see the black on the inside looking out .

I also tried mixing some Tamiya Acrylic X-6 Orange and X-7 Red (50%/50%)  for the International Orange color . It looks okay on the stick , so I'll give it a go tomorrow on the nose and tail boom .

                     John .

nice updates helo, the lindberg kit now looks more serious than from the box (i search for mine but probably was destroyed and gone in the recycle bin)

Suppression even me think to a similar mod on radial engines but never try till now. Your result is really good and nice wood on dancefloor

My paint mix of 50/50 Tamiya X-6 and X-7 for the International Red/Orange worked out nicely ;

The next day I masked and gave the HH-3E a few light coats of ADC Gray (Gunze H-61) ;

Today I'll mask for the flat black around the engine exhaust and lower canopy frame lines .

                      John .

I have completed the rest of the painting on the Alaskan Air Command HH-3E ;

Decals will be next .

                    John .

I haven't started the decals on the HH-3E as yet , instead I decided to do some preliminary work on the next CH-3E "Crazy Legs"  build .

As with the fist build I cut open the cabin door and drilled out the two fueling points on the left fuselage ;

Then I cut some sheet plastic the same size as the cockpit bulkhead and drilled and filed some openigs for shelves ;

The equipment rack should look okay once it's painted along with rest of the fuselage interior ;

Next I started on the fixed landing gear struts . I used some spare support strut brackets cut from an old Revell Seaking kit ;

I also added some old H-34  landing gear struts cut to size as extra suppot pieces ;

The fixed style landing gear seems to look the part ;

It was a lot of trial and error and it  took me a lot longer to do than I first thought but I'm happy with the results ;

Next I'll cut some plastic for the rear cabin floor and work on the rear cabin seats as well .

               John .

Decals are on the HH-3E first build ;

Tomorrow I'll give her a couple of coats of clear flat , then glue on the last bits and post finish pic's .

              John .

Great progress helo the scratched landing on the second looks good

Here's some pic's of my completed HH-3E Alaskan Air Command SAR Helicopter .

I enjoyed the build , in fact it's the first time in a long time that I actually finished a build just several weeks after starting it . All my other on-going builds seem to drag on for months , so I'm quite pleased with my efforts and I hope build (2) "Crazy Legs" goes as good as this one .

                            John .

Helo H-34

Another impressive build! Excellent results and considering the simplicity of the kit good use of scratch building.

Progress is slow on CF-SAM yet looking forward to getting more time to build. Aside from monthly 'build nights' at our club I have been requesting more to get extra build time in.

Jason

Nice, clean (and quick)  build of an unusual subject. Bravo Zulu!

my occasionally ridiculous update compared to the great Helo finished HH-3E

A red was used on another kit and take advantage to paint the relative seabat red parts .... enamels costs

not founf actually a correct color for the high visible red but i have the impression that another thinned layer on the same red (under color was white) can approach to the definitive acceptable color

heres the real from airliners.net

Bsyamato , your H-34 Seabat build is coming along nicely 

As for me , I decided to buy a couple of those inexpensive  1/72 Starfix HH-3E kits to use some of the cockpit pieces in the Lindberg CH-3E build as Starfix supply some nice cyclic sticks , foot pedals , seats and pilots .

One of the main reason for purchasing these two kits is that they come with a nice under fuselage hoist for external sling loads ;

The Carzy Legs CH-3E is fiited with one of those hoists , so my thinking was to add it to my Lindberg 2nd build .

However last night I was eyeballing the Starfix kit and started thinking about what I would need to do to fix some of the main inaccuracies and perhaps use the Starfix HH-3E as the base kit for my CH-3E Crazy Legs build .

The Starfix HH-3E main rotor housing is much nicer than Lindbergs kit but there is no bulge on the left side of the rotor housing to depict the APU unit . This could be fixed with a little Tamiya putty and sanded to shape ;

One of the biggest issue's is the size of the two overhead cockpit tinted window's , Starfix made theirs too narrow in width . So I two spare Lindberg canopies and decided to have a go at carefully cutting out the overhead canopy window's and file the opening bigger on the Starfix fuselage ;

 This seemed to work out okay ;

So now I have decided to use the Starfix HH-3E kit as my CH-3E Crazy Legs build ;

Next I cut open the side fuselage door and then glued some plastic strip to the opening to make up for the saw cut and filing . I also decided to cut open the pilots side cockpit window's to pose them open  ;

While doing this I suddenly discovered that I made a mistake on my first Alaskan HH-3E build in that Lindberg didn't mold a frame line down the middle of the pilots side window's , so I'll have to go back and re-mask those side window's and airbrush for a center frame line .

Anyway I continued on with the Starfix kit and cut open the rear ramp and I made some cockpit bulkheads for the interior ; One behind the pilots ( Starfix didn't supply one ) and the other I'll file some openings for shelves to depict the equipment rack . The one I had made already for the Lindberg fuselage is 2mm too wide for the Starfix kit , so I'll just make another .

That's about it so far , my apologies for swapping and changing things so much but hopfully it should all work out .

John .

Never hear about starfix you're buildin half of the gb kits LOL

If i found where's my lindberg copy could try to use for an italian hh-3F conversion but not found where i suppose was i fear  thrashed it 

Hi guy's ;

I've made a little more progress on Crazy Legs ; Starfix don't offer any type of front landing gear boxing or wheel well , just a slight recess in the underside fuselage halves ;

 I found an old H-53 Front landing gear boxing in the spares box and decided to use that , so I cut a notch in both fuselage halves to accommadate the landing gear boxing ;

It looked a little too long at first , so I shortened it and filled in the gap with some plastic strip .

The I extended the cockpit floor and glued the bulkhead in place , then I filed out  the equipment rack bulkhead and added some plastic strip for shelves ;

Everything seems to dry fit okay ;

Tomorrow I'll try and get some interior painting done on the fuselage halves and cockpit pieces ;

So I'm going along nicely .

John .

I'm making slow but steady progress on the CH-3E "Crazy Legs" builds ; yeah now I'm doin' two .

After swapping and changing my mind so many times , I decided to build the Lindberg kit as well as the Starfix kit side by side .

The Lindberg build will be finished in the same paint scheme of the Alaskan Air Command HH-3E and the Starfix build will have the SEA camouflage from the Vietnam War .

Anyway the starfix kit doesn't have an APU unit molded to the left upper rotor housing , so I copied some pic's into the computer that a fellow FSM member , jeaton , posted a while back in the helicopter section of some walk around pic's he took of a USAF HH-3E ; http://yolo.net/~jeaton/Helicopters/hh3/hh3.htm

Working froma couple of pic's I printed out ;

I had a go at trying to scratch build something similar by laminating some 6.5mm x 1.5mm plastic strip together

Then I tried to file the little piece to a similar contour and shape ;

I guess it looks kinda okay , so after that I had a go at using the Trumpeter rivet maker and followed some pencil lines I drew on the Starfix smooth fuselage ;

This worked out okay too , so then it was onto painting the cockpit pieces and the masking tape / plastic strip seat backs and UH-1D Huey seat bases , glue the fuselage windows in place and then glue the interior pieces in place as well ;

Close up of the cabin seats and cockpit ;

Back to the APU unit , you can see in the next pic hoe different the fuselage pieces are on the Lindberg kit with the molded in APU and the Starfix kit ;

Quite a bit of difference between the two kits , which made it a little difficult making the APU for the Starfix fuselage as it is not as rounded at the top of the cabin roof section as it blends into the rotor housing like on Lindbergs kit .

Next I'll glue the fuselage halves together and I'll make another set of fixed landing gear struts for the Starfix kit .

John .

The famous "rivet counter" LOL!

(need one again )

Great updates Helo and good mods on the fuselage  

Agreed excellent work improving the kits!

Anyone see our host around? Seems he is MIA and not stopping in to update the entry page.

Looking forward to getting some work done and posted, hope to set up on the kitchen table a few times...