1/72 Hasegawa AH-1F

Gallery Article by Austin Kennedy on Jan 17 2011

20th Anniversary of "Operation Desert Storm"

 

I built the Hasegawa AH-1F for the Second Desert Storm Group Build in the forums. It represents the AH-1F in N Troop, 2nd Aviation Bde, 2nd ACR, serial number 68-17082, also known as "Wild Thing".  I built it mainly out of the box with little modification.  I added a chaff/flare dispenser to the tail that I had cast during my one of my previous builds.  I also modified the TOW missile launcher.

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I painted the model using MM acryl Army/Marine Gulf Sand for the lighter color and Tamiya's Desert Yellow.  I gloss coated the model with krylon's acrylic gloss coat, applied the decals from Werner Wings (which are top notch, by the way) and applied another gloss coat.  The nice thing about the actual helicopter, 'Wild Thing', and other helicopters that were painted sand during ODS was their lack of stencils.  That really helps out if you don't like decaling.

I put more emphasis on my weathering this model more than others, as I wanted to test out how Vallejo Acrylics worked.  I thinned them with water and did a little section at a time, and I really like the way it turned out.

Another thing that I did differently was the ALQ-144.  I took Echelon's M-113 pink vision blocks, cut them to size, and added them to the squares on the ALQ-144 to recreate the reflective properties.

Austin Kennedy

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Photos and text © by Austin Kennedy