By Chris Cork
For starters I was using a bootleg kit, made by a Chinese company called 'Lee' that I had never heard of before and which I bought in the Pakistan Airforce Museum in Karachi a couple of years back. The kit is 1/72 and scaled down from an Italeri kit that was in 1/48....and the scaling of the parts was not consistent. So nightmare one was with the various cockpit parts that all had to be modified to fit...roughly.
Then there was the rotorhead. This was a real test of ingenuity and patience. But eventually went together only to find that it would not mount inside the fuselage, so had to scratch some supports to get it in there.
Then there were the myriad sink marks most of which got filled and a few which didn't or I simply missed.
Nothing lined up, surface detail was inconsistent, there is about an ounce of filler in various paces and all in all it was an utter dog of a build.
Painting...ah yes. as you can see this is a complex scheme. I was using the WEM Russian colours that are nice but slow drying, which extended the build time somewhat.
I added a few grabhandles from fuse wire and a pitot tube on the port side of the nose.
The undercarriage is out of line, the sensors on the pitot tube on the nose are on the wrong way around, the stores are all over the place and the painting looks like I did it with a squirrels tail...whilst still attached to the squirrel. The paint lines on the green/sand interface on the winglets are MEANT to be irregular...its not that I failed to mask them.
The transfers were terrible...
Things looked a bit better after a dulcote but this is not one I am putting in the hall of fame. Its a hard build and not that satisfactory, but have to say it has a certain rugged appeal.
For the non-modelers among you...you might wonder why one bothers...well its a question I sometimes ask myself at the end of a build like this. And then go on to build another one.
Tootle-pip...
Chris
