Airfix Westland Sea King Hc.4 1/72 Model Kit

03.28.18

Make / Model: Airfix Westland Sea King Hc.4 1/72 Model Kit
Year: Recent?

Quality

Pretty Good. Attention to detail good. More detail than what you see, but not extremely in-depth. Great decals. Good quality plastic. Easy to remove pieces from sprues.

Ease of Assembly

A little difficult. Some of the parts (such as antennas) simply did not have holes in the body to be attached.

Impressions

After building the Stearman with my daughter, I decided to pick up a model helicopter and try my hand at it. I really like helicopters, and my favorite is the MH-53. The store actually had that model. But it looked like a total pain in the ass to build. So I got this. I mean, a sea king is similar, right?…

…right away, the cockpit detail was a little more than I was looking for. Some parts were a bit difficult, though this is a refeclection of my skill (novice) rather than anything else…

…I only have some primary colors of acrylics, and even then, I was missing yellow, so I did this thing with red an black ‘basics’ acrylics. I also picked up a little bottle of ‘tan’ testors enamel, which helped, for seats and stuff…

fig. 3. It’s a boat/helicopter!. Detail of some wash.

…I made a little wash from black acrylic and water, then painted it heavy, then wiped off, so the black stays in the recessed lines. Repeat until desired effect. After building this, I watched some youtube videos and learned companies make paints that do this, specifically. Crazy!…

fig. 4. Looking rough. Note: That is all wash, no paint.

…I also did a bunch of the black parts with a copic marker, instead of paint, cuz fuckit. Also, I didn’t have an easy way to apply a shitton of grey, so I just did the wash over the plastic’s native color. No other paint…

fig. 5 Basically done, minus a clear coat I applied later to protect wash.

…I built it with the stairs down, so the interior could be seen. I made no attempt to paint the clear parts. And I totally fucked a couple windows by using testors glue near them.

Conclusion

Overall, a fun build. But I defeintely didn’t do that great of a job with finishing. I was re-learning what to do here…

fig. 6 Clear coat made it look less ‘model-y’, probably due to lack of chassis paint.

After the clear coat, I thought it actually looked pretty good though. Odd.

Fun kit though, and I would like to build some more Airfix kits in the future, but probably only for aircraft I am super stoked on.