Airfix 1/72 Westland Lynx by Gary Jarman

Gary models the Lynx AH1 on display at Middle Wallop Museum of Army Flying. This helicopter entered service with the Army Air Corps in 1978. This particular aircraft, is a prototype which broke the world speed record in June 1972 and became the first helicopter ever to complete a barrel roll.

This is a kit that I started a while back and for months now it has been laying in the box of spares (together with three other uncompleted projects). A month or two back I got the urge to continue with it and a quick search of the spares box revealed I had most of the parts. The few that I didn’t have I found in one of my kids incomplete kits (Luca was building the Royal Navy version and fortunately they share a lot of common parts).
I decided to finish it to the best of my abilities and then, as it’s one of the few British subjects I have, I’d enter it into the clubs St George’s competition.

The helicopter at the museum has a lot of wiring and ribbing in the passenger section. I had some fun adding this detail to the kit. I used plain old plastic card for this, cut into thin strips and glued in place. The wiring was made from stretched sprue put together into bundles. To make it easier to deal with I dipped the one end of each bundle into PVA and let that dry. This kept all the strands of sprue together. To simulate the Velcro straps keeping the bundles together I used thin strips of tin foil which is easy to wrap around the sprue, sealing it with a drop of PVA.

I have not tried to replicate the museums example exactly because there are just too many bundles of wires and in 1/72 scale it would drive me batty to even try. So I’ve just put in a number of random bundles, enough I hope to add interest.
The seats in the kit are very basic. Using plastic card with holes drilled into it, stretched sprue for the extra bars at the base and the end of assorted spare parts cut off for the seat belt canisters I made them look a lot more detailed.

I also needed to create a new door as the door on one side of the museum aircraft is open while the other is closed. The kit doors have one large window in them, while the museum helicopter has three smaller windows in each door. I cut out sheets of plastic card using the kit doors as a template. The windows were cut out of the card using photos as a guide. One of the doors I left as just a flat sheet of plastic because this door will be in the open position and no interior detail will be visible. The other however, needed some interior detail. I glued on strips and blocks of plastic card and, when the glue was dry, scraped the edges of these strips and blocks with a scalpel to give them a more rounded edges. I also used some fine sand paper to try making things more ‘curvy’.

The museum has one engine on display so I cut away the kit cowling and put in a floor and sidewalls using plastic card with thinner strips to represent the ribs. Digging through the spares box I found a spare Alouette engine which I used as the base for my engine. I glued this engine in and left it at that because I knew that if I added finer detail now it would just get knocked off during the build.

Next I turned my attention to the tail area. The museum aircraft has a different profiled tail compared to that of the production aircraft. I did a lot of filing on the kit to narrow the tail both width and depth wise. Then I glued a load of strips of plastic card to the boom and filed that to the correct shape. The picture shows the difference between the kit and my modifications.

The cockpit roof is an empty shell as provided with the kit. I filled it with putty and then attached some boxes scrounged from the spares box to make it look a bit busy up there. Since doing this I had a closer look at the aircraft when I popped in to the Middle Wallop model show and my representation is not quite right but hey, apart from you and me, no one else knows that.

By now my usual impatience was starting to show and I put the seatbelts on a seat and added it to the cockpit. The belts on this chair are too thick, I did, at a later stage, replace them with thinner ones. I used tin foil to make these as it’s easy to bend into the required shape.

The rotors were next. I’m really happy with the main rotors. I am definitely getting better with my airbrushing techniques and that, together with a lesson I learnt from Paul, I believe I got a really good finish. The lesson from Paul was that masking even the smallest band makes the finish that little better. The rotors turned into a mask fest as I first masked the grey parts and then pained the black of the rotors themselves. Then on the arm of each rotor I masked a little red and yellow stripe and a blue line. The real aircraft does have some of these and, I think, they do add that little extra. The yellow bands were from the spare decals that I have.

For a long time I’ve envied those of you that manage to get their decals to look as if they have been painted on. Until now my decals, no matter how hard I have tried have never looked painted on and have usually suffered from some degree of silvering. So this time I sprayed gloss varnish on the rotors and then I spent about an hour gently polishing the rotors with micromesh until I had a smooth finish. Then I applied the decals. The results are definitely a huge improvement. Some of them look painted on. Some sadly still suffer from silvering but that’s where they folded over the rotor and then overlapped each other. Next time I will not cut the decals so they fold over, I’ll do just enough to cover one side at a time.

Another problem I encountered as a result of my folding over approach was that the decals stuck out from the edge of the rotor. After leaving them for a few days I used a sharp knife to cut the excess off and applied some microsol.

The tail rotors also benefited from all of my reading of some of the build articles in this magazine. A number of you, if you’re unhappy with something will start all over again. I painted them once but due to clumsy airbrushing I ended up with ridges at the mask edges. I tried to polish them down to no avail. So I started all over again! What you see here is my second attempt.

I filed the canopy to make it thinner. This build has broken a few barriers for me. I always had a fear of ruining the clear plastic parts and so would not usually do anything that might ruin them. However, now that I know about the miracle of micromesh I am quite happy to file away at these parts. The only difference between them and normal plastic parts is that they tend to be more brittle so you need to treat them a little more gently. I filed it thinner, and then added some thin strips of plastic to represent the internal framing. While I was at it I also filed off the moulded on wipers as I planned to use some spare etch metal ones I’d found in my spares box (courtesy of the same Alouette build that had donated the engine).

I attached all the parts and started painting. I used Humbrol enamels for this as I am trying to use them all up before I convert to acrylics.

Once the painting was done I started on the engine. I tried to make it look busy while realising that I’ll never get an accurate representation of it. So from the spares box I used pipes and boxes etc cut off assorted spare parts. A few of them I painted a base colour and then masked to add some bands. Finally I added some spare etch detail and some stretched sprue. I am very happy with the result.

At about the same time I added the barriers that the museum display has at the end of the sliding doors. (These can be seen painted in the above picture).

I started thinking about the decals and again, I wanted to achieve the painted on look. So I took a chance. I had airbrushed a coat of gloss varnish over the camouflage. But now I painted a layer of gloss varnish where the main decals would be placed. This resulted in a clear demarcation between the airbrushed and the brush painted areas. I did this because I felt that I needed a thicker layer of varnish and my airbrushing skills are not that good that I can consistently get an even, ‘thick’, layer of varnish. Next I got my micromesh sheets out and started gently polishing the entire helicopter, concentrating on the areas where I’d hand brushed the varnish on. Thankfully I managed to polish the demarcations away and in the process I got an amazingly smooth finish. Now I realise that for many of you this is ‘modelling as normal’, but for me it was a revelation and something to celebrate. No matter how hard I have tried my airbrushing has always resulted in a fine orange peel texture and this has always resulted in at least one area of silvering.

So I tested my new surface and put on a decal. It looked painted on!!!

I’ve jumped around in the text here. I had realised that the gluing of the skids to the fuselage was going to be a fragile affair and so I drilled some holes and put in some anchoring pins. While you’re looking at that photo look at that smooth finish!!!

Even with these pins in place (I only did them for the back attachment points) the skids were still a little shaky. So I used PVA to get them set in place and then ran some superglue around the edges using a piece of stretched sprue to get it in place. This did mean that I had to do some filing and consequent touch up work to that lovely smooth surface, but (a) it’s an area that isn’t easily noticed and (b) I now have skids attached in a very secure way.

By now I was getting impatient to finish the thing. I started on the engine covers that would be in the open position.

I also started on the doors. Only one of these was supposed to be modelled open and I started work on detailing one of them only to find that, when I test fitted it, I’d detailed the wrong door!! I tried fitting the other door and found that it didn’t fit well in any case, so I opted to model both doors open. Having finished the doors however I felt that, with the added internal framing, they looked too thick and also, the framing has resulted in some misting of the clear part. So I started all over again. This time I made sure to thin the correct door (as per the museum exhibit) and I filed the other door so that it fitted better in the closed position. This time, for the open door I filed it a lot thinner than I had previously and I used the thinnest plastic card that I have to cut the framing. I’m not sure what the thickness is but it is, literally, paper thin. I was much happier with the result.

In the mean time I had put a plea for decals for the serial numbers (XX153) out on BritModeller. I did manage to arrange a swap but, with my earlier impatience and putting the ARMY decal on, I had a mismatch between thickness of prints between the serial number and the ARMY. I had got two ARMY decals in the same font as the serial number, so I tried removing the ARMY decals I had applied. It soon became evident that I might ruin the underlying paint trying to get these decals off so I took the coward’s way out. I used the kit serial number but I just cut the decals up (there are decals provided for two options) so that instead of XK it had XX (hey, at least it’s not totally inaccurate).

The rescue decals by the rotor required some cutting and matching because the kit decals have the DANGER along the boom and the arrow then does a 45 degree turn up the tail. I cut them and matched the pieces so that the arrow pointed along the same line as the boom.

And then my plans fell apart … big time. It was time to spray a light coat of matt varnish and then add those final parts (doors, engine covers). I sprayed a light coat on one part, all looked good and so I sprayed the rest of the helicopter. It matted up nicely. But then I started wondering, was that a trace of white?! It was! The varnish was drying with a white/grey sheen. Quickly I sprayed a coat of gloss over it hoping that this would somehow reduce the effect. It did, but not enough. So then I got the micromesh out thinking that maybe, just maybe, I could rub the varnish off. No such luck.

And so I resigned myself to the fact that the past who knows how many hours careful work had been undone in 20 minutes. I stuck all the remaining parts on so that I could imagine what it would have looked like.

Anyway, what lesson did I learn? Only do models of subjects that require a gloss coat!