UH-1H Huey - Fiddlers Green - 1/72 rescale

[lwalter]

My first helicopter build.

[Don Boose]

Very nice work on this DUSTOFF Huey.

Don

[Rata]

Well done and in a smallish scale too!

[lwalter]

Thank you Don and Rata for your kind words!

After some tries with 1/100 and 1/48 scales, I'm now settling for 1/72. Not as small as 1/100 and still small enough to store on my shelves

I still have to learn how to perfectly adjust every components and how to hide these white lines from the paper thickness. For the latter, I will try thinner paper next time.

[Rata]

Originally Posted by lwalter

I still have to learn how to perfectly adjust every components and how to hide these white lines from the paper thickness. For the latter, I will try thinner paper next time.

Thinner paper has it's own risks and might cause more problems than it solves. The worst being difficult to handle and more easily going out of shape.

As for the white showing, what I did until recently is build a small collection of cheap artist's acrylics-those tube types you see in the dollar stores are perfectly adequate. Mix small blobs of those to match the adjacent colours to the offending edges and apply with those small, soft and pointy hobby brushes. Deciding what edges to do before or after joining is important. Overlap fuselage sections I found were best done before joining and things like wing and tail trailing edges done after.
The trick is dampen the brush slightly before hand and keep the paint on there to the absolute minimum. Getting bits of it over colour printed areas is not the best time to find out you haven't matched the colour properly. It's almost impossible to remove.
I've not tried oil paints; they may be superior but take longer to dry and you have the smells....

However lately I've been getting pretty good results using colour pencils. Again, the cheap ones are fine but are more reluctant to go on. Repeatedly dampening the tip slightly is the trick. Of course unlike paint they can't be mixed to match but some sets have a huge range of colours (mine has 48) that has one for every occasion.
The beauty of pencils is if you slip they're far less likely to mess up those precious printed areas.

Hope the foregoing is of some help.

Garry G.

[-Jim G]

[QUOTE=Rata;777570]Thinner paper has it's own risks and might cause more problems than it solves. The worst being difficult to handle and more easily going out of shape.

As for the white showing, what I did until recently is build a small collection of cheap artist's acrylics-those tube types you see in the dollar stores are perfectly adequate. Mix small blobs of those to match the adjacent colours to the offending edges and apply with those small, soft and pointy hobby brushes. Deciding what edges to do before or after joining is important. Overlap fuselage sections I found were best done before joining and things like wing and tail trailing edges done after./QUOTE]

An additional trick to minimizing the unsightly paper edges is to cut off the glue tabs from the model pieces, and make new joiner strips from scrap cardstock. In this way the joints on the model can butt up to each other without the bulge. Coloring the edges with markers, etc hides the joints further.

It is fun for me to see the FG models that you are building!

[-Jim G]

Originally Posted by Rata

Thinner paper has it's own risks and might cause more problems than it solves. The worst being difficult to handle and more easily going out of shape.

As for the white showing, what I did until recently is build a small collection of cheap artist's acrylics-those tube types you see in the dollar stores are perfectly adequate. Mix small blobs of those to match the adjacent colours to the offending edges and apply with those small, soft and pointy hobby brushes. Deciding what edges to do before or after joining is important. Overlap fuselage sections I found were best done before joining and things like wing and tail trailing edges done after.

An additional trick to minimizing the unsightly paper edges is to cut off the glue tabs from the model pieces, and make new joiner strips from scrap cardstock. In this way the joints on the model can butt up to each other without the bulge. Coloring the edges with markers, etc hides the joints further.

It is fun for me to see the FG models that you are building!

[Burning Beard]

Another trick is to burnish the edges of the paper after you color it (I use water color pencils) then add the joiner strips, it makes a for a smoother build.