The kit is supposed to represent the
latest upgrades to the Super Cobra attack helicopter. I'm sure Italeri did
the best they could with the knowledge they had at the time, but the kit has
many inaccuracies and shortcomings. I corrected about half of them, a few
I found out about too late and the others were beyond the amount of work I
wanted to put in to this project. For those of you who might want to do
this kit up right, I'll point out of couple of major things that I didn't do.
The doghouse over the transmission on the real helicopter is much larger and
higher than the kit represents. Also, the horizontal stabilizers should be
moved back, almost all the way to the vertical stabilizer. Now on to the
things that I did do.
I used the Cobra Company cockpit set for the AH-1W as a starting point.
The consoles were modified by cutting them to the right shape, sanding off some
of the detail, and adding photoetch MFD's glued to sheet styrene. A new
row of buttons was added to the top of each console. These now gave a much
closer representation to the new Zebra model. Cooling ducts were added to
the seats by using guitar string, bent to shape. The boxes on the pilot's
console were wired, and a photoetch HUD was put in place.
On the exterior, I made a resin copy
of a FLIR turret and installed it under the nose. I noticed in the rollout
photos of the Zebra that shrouds were put on around the exhausts, so I made them
out of sheet styrene.
I also noticed two small
boxes on both sides of the helicopter, under the cockpit, so I added those as
well. A couple oil drain spouts and vent tubes were put on the bottom of
the fuselage, made from stretched sprue. The "disco light" was
also replaced by a resin cast part, as the kit part looked pretty poor.
I detailed the Hellfire racks and missiles. The racks simply received
small bits of styrene to dress them up. The missiles had the noses chopped
off, and clear epoxy put in its place. Well worth the effort, they look
fantastic.
The rest of the kit went pretty
much out of the box, even the decals. I made up the paint job, I figure
the chopper is not even in service yet, who's going to call me on it? I
did kind of a snakeskin pattern, nothing too elaborate but I thought it looked
cool.
The kit is a welcome addition to my other helos, it's about as modern as you can
get right now. I do want to publicly thank David Campbell, who
supplied me with a wealth of information and advice, as I stole many of his
ideas and applied them to my model. He did a thousand things more to his
than I did to mine, maybe we can all con him into sharing his work with us on
ARC. If the Steves will allow me, I'll plug his website here:
Hover Lovers Homepage
http://www.angelfire.com/ca4/hlmp/home.html
Kelly
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