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True Blue Sea King


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I suppose I had better start documenting my build. I'm not actually starting late. This build has been ongoing since the start - it has just been slow 'cos of all the other builds I have going.

I really like building very early versions of aircraft. Sometimes (and particularly with British aircraft) they represent versions of aircraft that weren't particularly good and had to evolve to become useful aircraft. That's what I find quite fascinating.

It's not the case with the Sea King as it was a mature design before Westland started building it, so it was useful right out of the blocks. However, we are used to seeing Westland Sea Kings with some sort of intake shield and a six-bladed tail rotor. Mu build will be a very early HAS.1 with not intake shields and the five-bladed tail rotor.

I will be using the Revell kit and Modeldecal Sheet 49 to represent an aircraft from 824 NAS in 1970.

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The Modeldecals are a bit of a gamble as they have been in The Stash since 1979 when it was first published.

So... photos of the sprues.

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We start with the interior. The first step is to fit the forward window and fill it in. The interior is then painted grey. I am not sure about the seating arrangements in the HAS.1 so I have made my best guess. The seats opposite the main door have been stowed.

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The rest of the interior is now completed, again with my best guess as to the seating arrangement. There should be a device to lower the sonobuoy but I'm going to live without it. The seat harnesses are from Eduard. They are British WW2 vintage Q-type harnesses, but they seem to look the part.

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The fuselage halves are now closed up. There is a lot of cleaning up to do. This involves sanding down the blanked off window opening on the port side and removing the flare dispenser mountings. More about this over the next couple of days.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Sprayed overall with a blue mixture of my own concoction. It is mostly Lifecolor Non-specular Sea Blue with about 20% Lifecolor French Blue to lighten it slightly.

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And the stickers applied. :fool:

These are Modeldecals and are over 35 years old, so I was expectings some "issues"... But there were none. They behaved perfectly! :thumbsup:

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hoping you haven't fixed the main rotor head in place, as the blades should have the roots cut away to represent the original metal type, as detailed here:

Thanks for the heads up, Andy. :thumbsup: I knew about the blade roots but as I was running out of time I decided to live with it for the time being. When I build the forthcoming Airfix kit, I'll revisit the blades on this one.

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Nice to see a blue one. Decals look good. I did an 826 cab from '93 recently and had to resort to some small individual serial nos. from Ventura Decals just to get XV674. Nerve racking

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