Westland Whirlwind in Austrian service.

[Whofan]

First build in my Austrian Air Force project. My mother in law was Austrian,  and we spent many holidays with our relatives in Carinthia, Southern Austria, staying with them halfway up the valley of the Drau between Spittal and Villach.

 

We would often see Austrian Air force planes and helicopters flying along the valley, usually below our level (I think the relative's house was something like 1,000 metres abouve sea level) including Drakens on one rather noisy and exciting day, and some later helicopters. The Westland Whirlwind flown by Austria's Air force served between '58 and '65, long before I met my wife.

 

The model flown was the Whirlwind Srs. 2 (HAR Mk 5) which the eagle eyed and helicopter buffs will see is not what the Airfix kit I modelled is! My excuse is that I have had decals for this for months, couldn't find for love nor money a suitable italeri kit, so decided "what the hell" and got on with it.

 

Actually, my wife won't have a clue if it's the right mark or not, so to an extent it doesn't matter!)

 

The build was OOB, except for a little bit of albion alloys tube, brush painted overall in Tamiya RLM 02  (supposedly grey, looks green to me.) I've painted the rotor blades in Tamiya flat aluminium, I couldn't find a clear "guide" to the real colours used. The Decals come from Blackbird Decals, they went on easily and without too much  - if any - silvering.

 

As I mentioned in Ced's WIP of his scary skeeter, I had a Frank Spencer moment with the windscreen, where masking went awry and I had a devil of a job cleaning up the overpaint, but lessons learnt and all that. The upper side "glazing" was not of the best quality, and after gluing in some formula 560 was used to fill in several gaps. Mostly fairly well. One window from the side didn't like the pressure exerted while I was holding the model, and popped back into the fuselage. Rather than split the fuselage to remove it, I used a small square cut from a Sainsburys danish pastry box, glued that on with formula 560, and decided to think of the kit as Captain Hook's crocodile, as like the croc, you can hear something rattling around it  ......

 

So here it is, apologies for the slightly dark photos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 6, 2020 by Whofan