Frog Westland Wessex - finished

[AdrianMF]

Hello All,

Well, I haven't quite got helicopters out of my system with the group build...

At the Cosford model show I was rummaging in the bagged kits section on a stand and I came across a bagged Frog Wessex for £1.99. When I asked the man whether the boxed one was complete he said he didn't know and threw it in for free! So I now have two Wessexes for 99p each - seems rude not to build at least one.



The boxed one is complete, so I decided to build the bagged one. There are some issues with it.



The canopy is subtly short shot - the right hand side of the windscreen has shrivelled a bit and does not fit. Some of the windows were missing, but that's not big loss as they all needed replacing anyway. There is also a missing rotor plate (here replicated out of plastic card and rod), bulkhead (plastic card and scored wine bottle foil), and a missing seat (spares box).

I knocked up a quick cockpit from the seats, balsa, card, rod and fuse wire. I also cut away the shrivelled side windscreen and located a Frog Blenheim turret as a donor for a replacement pane:



Cockpit painted and fitted:




Replacement pane cut from the turret:



I made some replacement side window frames from card:



And here are the parts for the windscreen taped together. I will file down the new pane and add a pillar to the edge:



The bulged side window needed replacing so I made a quick balsa and superglue plunge mould:



It fits!



And I've hollowed out the exhausts:



So I plan to use the decals from the boxed kit and go with the overall blue scheme. Two questions:

Is it blue or blue-grey?
Is there a source of white letters and numbers in Royal Navy font? I have a number of projects that are crying out for these (including a tasty orange and blue scheme for this one), but I can't find a suitable decal sheet.

Thanks for looking,
Adrian

Edited July 31, 2016 by AdrianMF

[Miggers]

Try this Adrian:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/Model-Kits/1188/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=white%20lettering&_dcat=1188&Scale=1%253A72&rt=nc&_trksid=p2045573.m1684

The "blue-grey" can sometimes be RAF Blue Grey or Extra Dark Sea Grey(AKA EDSG)

Good work,the old Frog Wessex is still reputed to be the pick of the bunch for accuracy of shape and

dimensions.

Edited June 20, 2016 by Miggers

[71chally]

...Modeldecal also covered the RN SAR Wessex HAS.1 https://www.hannants.co.uk/product/MD099and on Set 18.

The colour is RAF Blue Grey BS381C-633, not Extra Dark Sea Grey

Superb work on the Frog kit!

[AdrianMF]

Thanks Miggers and 71chally! I trawled through Hannants and didn't think to try EBay. Looks like I have some choices to make!

Regards,

Adrian

Edited June 20, 2016 by AdrianMF

[English Electric]

_Adrian,

_{That looks cracking!! Let me know if you need any spares etc for this as I have a few of them knocking round...}

_{Always good to see a Frog kit being fettled and that's happening here...}

_Chris

[CliffB]

Excellent work Adrian (I particularly like the plunge moulding ).

Cliff

[AdrianMF]

Thank you all! The ModelDecal set is winging its way from ebay as we speak. I have noted the generic number sets for some future projects. Don't know how I managed to miss them on Hannants!

_{... Let me know if you need any spares etc for this as I have a few of them knocking round...}

Now I've got the cockpit and canopy (almost) sorted I'm basically done with mods. The moulding is very "basic" by modern standards but it's nice and crisp. I need to replace the undercarriage legs with 1.5/2mm brass wire and I am going to add a grille or two up top when I find something suitable. I might even throw on an aerial or two.

Excellent work Adrian (I particularly like the plunge moulding ).

Cliff

I kept it super-simple because I wanted to do one more job before packing away on Saturday. If the longest part of the job is "waiting for the superglue to dry" then you can tell you are probably going a bit too fast!

Regards,
Adrian

[Tomoshenko]

Excellent work. Some nice scratch going on. Cockpit looks great. What do youuse for the instrument panel?

[perdu]

I love the Froggy Wessex, still my favourite after many other attempts from 'the others'

I think the Frog wheels are a bit big, but you do get spoke patterns.

I'll be watching and enjoying it

[AdrianMF]

Excellent work. Some nice scratch going on. Cockpit looks great. What do youuse for the instrument panel?

Thanks. I used plain plastic card, painted grey. Then I drew small disks on with a permanent black ink pen (Uniball or Faber-Castell do pens with 0.1mm tips). Then I simply scratched back to the white plastic with a pointed scriber. I used to drill holes and laminate things up, but this is much quicker and I can't tell the difference through the canopy glass. On a recent Sea King I couldn't see a thing at the end of the build.

Also, if it doesn't come out right I can either touch it up, or scrape everything off and start again. The body of the panel is a lump of balsa, sanded down until it fitted the gap, and the coaming is a piece of paper covered in superglue.

I love the Froggy Wessex, still my favourite after many other attempts from 'the others'

I think the Frog wheels are a bit big, but you do get spoke patterns.

I'll be watching and enjoying it

It's a lovely kit. I find Frog kits very variable in design, accuracy and finesse, but this one is a cracker.

Regards,

Adrian

Edited June 20, 2016 by AdrianMF

[heloman1]

Hi Adrian, that is the original boxing of the Frog Wessex kit, so keep the box safe, there are people who like to collect boxes too. I reckon, it's still one of the better renditions of thw Wessex in kit form but it represents an early RN airfame.

To your question re the colour, yes RAF BG but with a semi gloss finish.

Colin

[Pete in Lincs]

The Wessex, lovely old bus.

I started on HC2's in 1976 and left the

military aircraft scene last year.

Oh, I always loved Frog kits too!

[AdrianMF]

Hello again,

Well I got my Modeldecal 99 sheet and it has around 20 Wessex colour schemes on it. Sad that it then calls out for you to supply your own numbers and roundels, and only has one set of the "generic" markings (walkways and stencils), so although it is cheap (and I can see the justification) you need a full spares box to use it! So I bought the Xtradecal white letter sheets too (I already have some D type roundels). So my 99p kits have now cost £8.99 each so far. When I started looking at the decals, I realised that the Frog kit is an early HAS.1, with small, square windows, so I can't do most of the schemes because they have the later enlarged rectangular windows. I've gone back to doing the plain grey/blue scheme, of a pre-production model, supported by this picture. Which is pretty much exactly the scheme in the kit decals. Hey-ho...

XM328 has an interesting history - it was one of the first pre-production aircraft used in trials, was later modified to serve as an HAS-3, and has now been restored by the Helicopter Museum in Weston-Super-Mare.

With the agony of prototype choice over, my mojo was restored and I could resume modelling. You will recall the canopy was misshapen. Well, I glued my piece of Frog Blenheim turret in (this is a Frog build, after all!) whittled it down and stuck on a side frame. I'm pretty happy with the result, with and without side windows:

I used Revell Contacta to join the two transparencies together, and then used superglue to add the frame piece after colouring the edge of the glass black with a sharpie. I seem to have got some clean joints with no "silvering" from internal reflections.

Note that the picture of the trials aircraft above shows it with the side windows removed, which means I should have spent more time on my cockpit detailing!

I also reviewed what detail I could see in the photo above and referred to on-line sprue shots of kits (the Fly 1/144 and Italeri 1/48), and started adding some scale-ish detail to the body to make it look a bit busier:

This lunchtime I will visit the local Posh Supermarket to see if I can find any teabags with fine nylon netting for the grills.

Thanks for looking,

Adrian

[Alpha Delta 210]

Great work, Adrian. I look forward to the next instalment.

[AdrianMF]

So I got to the shops. Superdrug was having a "three for two" offer on nail files and I found some teabags with non-biodegradable plastic nets. Manuka Honey, Peach and Rosemary isn't my usual tipple, being a "builder's tea" man myself, but I'm sure I can persuade someone at home to try it! So I will see how it goes (and I don't mean "does it taste nice"):



Thanks for looking,
Adrian

[Pete in Lincs]

Welcome back.

The sliding windows took a matter of moments

to refit and less to remove so they could/would

have been on & off frequently on a trials aircraft.

[AdrianMF]

Thanks for that Pete! I might see if I can make them "clip on"...

Regards,

Adrian

[moaning dolphin]

Nice to see you resurrect another 'classic', She is looking very nice so far and those 'challenges' look to have been simple enough for you to overcome. Looking forward to seeing more on this, you don't get many Wessie ones around. wot Pete said, those sliding windows were very easy and quick to remove, sometimes to a complete surprise to the unsuspecting pilot or maintainer! Don't grab anything in yellow and black stripes when climbing aircraft!

Bob

[PLC1966]

"The bulged side window needed replacing so I made a quick balsa and superglue plunge mould:"

Wassat then ?

[AdrianMF]

Thanks all. Useful information about the windows!

"The bulged side window needed replacing so I made a quick balsa and superglue plunge mould:"

Wassat then ?

It's like this. I make my patterns out of balsa sealed with superglue. I quite often forget to wear oven gloves, which makes it more interesting.

Regards,
Adrian

[71chally]

Superb detail work there, if you're still struggling for Wessex decals I have Modeldecal set 18 just for the Gannet, you're more than welcome to the Wessex bits.

[AdrianMF]

A mini update. I tried out my mesh:

A little rough around the edges. I would have been better off sticking the mesh on first and then building the surround, rather than cutting the mesh to fit, but (a) I had already stuck on the surround and ( in real life with my eyesight it looks fine.

And I tried out free-standing mesh on a spare chassis to see if it can be painted without going blobby. It seems it can:

And I've just got an account with postimg.cc after photobucket failed again to load my photos. I think this may be a permanent switch!

Thanks for looking,

Adrian

Edited July 6, 2016 by AdrianMF

[Tomoshenko]

That does look good. Worth the embarrassment of buying Manuka honey tea bags. Gawd knows what they'll taste like, probably smell nice though. Worth defecting to postimage. Photobucket is pure unadulterated evil.

[Blastvader]

That's looking great Adrian. I love all the little details. I must build a hellyflopter at some point.

[Nigel Heath]

Great looking work on an old classic.