Grasshoppers and Elephants

Managed to snag a deal on eBay for a 1/48 Huey Kit made by hobby boss.

Now its arrived and in my grubby mitts i get to decide what to do with the kit.

The Huey was used throughout the war with quite a few variants present.

This kit is for a UH-1C which apparently was brought in as a replacement for the UH-1B due to it not having enough power so it struggled to keep up with the slicks as it was weighed down with rocket pods and other weapons.

As cool as a Huey Hog gunship would be this kit did not come with any rocket pod or flex gun options so i did some poking around in my books and the internet to see  what it could be used for.

My first idea was to make some rocket pods out of plasticard and other bits i have in the bits box of doom. It would be cool to make a Sea Wolf Huey Gunship.

This was a attack squadron formed by the US navy to support the Brown Water Navy and Navy Seal Teams they predominantly used the UH-1B turns out looks wise this kit will be fine but the lack of Rocket pods made me decide against this.

I like the Idea of Building the Kit as a slick which is a troop transport of the Huey.

Most pictures i could find and references in books show slicks as UH-1A’s which look quite a bit different to this kit.

The Marines used the UH1-B/C model during the Vietnam War and named it the  UH1-E it was pretty much the same as the Army models apart from the use of Aluminium for the body of the helicopter instead of Magnesium which would corrode during transport and whilst operating from ships.

So my plan is to build the model and paint it as a UH1-E slick.

I ordered up a crew including pilot, co pilot and two door gunners with m60’s.

2 x options came in the set one set of guns come with the bits to mount them on the side of the huey the other set has them in the door gunners hands im going to use these ones.

This is the Kit, the doors are modeled on closed so im going to try to cut them out so i can have them open.
wish me luck im good at hamfisting things im either gonna chop out to much helicopter or slice a finger or two

The crew have arrived from empress miniatures, they look pretty swish its going to be fun making them fit the helicopter

the arms of the pilots are seperate so you have some options when you build them. The co pilot has a pen in one hand and a checklist in the other or it could be a map and a grease pencil marking coordinates on the move.

The figures are a bit smaller than the gringo40s sculpts, but they will look great in the helicopter.

It worked only scored the edge a few times, if it shows up when painted i will try to blend it in as battle damage.

the edges of the doorways will have to be built up with greenstuff to make them level with the floor of the interior.

I had to remove some of the seat with my snippers of doom to get the pilots to fit in at the rite angle.

their legs were at an odd angle so i chopped them about at the knees and greenstuffed them back together so they now sit up properly, im pretty pleased with the result.

The next step was to build the flying stand.

i used a long wooden stick that i attached to a base.

because the weight of the model unbalanced the stand i glued a load of washers to it then covered them up with rocks and milliput before gluing on sand to cover up the putty and washers.

I then drilled a hole up through the helicopters base into the block that holds the rotor blades.

to stop the model spinning on the stand i cut a plastic coller made of a superglue nozzle and slid it down onto the wooden stick.

when the model rests on the plastic ring it does not spin about any more and stays facing the direction that you left it in.

These guys are from gringo40s and are a team of sappers, i especially like the model of the guy turning the claymore mine around.

Sappers were used at the forefront of an assault and followed a doctrine of one slow four quick.

The slow phase was recon of the target and a slow movement to the target area

the point man moving slowly using his fingers to search for wires that could warn of their approach and laying mats over barbed wire so his unit could move more quickly during the assault.

followed by the four quicks , appraoch, attack, clearance and withdraw

The sappers would have designated targets that they would be sent to destroy with explosives sometimes using bangalore torpedoes made of bamboo poles with explosives on the end

This is a plastic model kit of the OH-6 Cayuse known as a loach.

As its a later model than the one used during the war i had to do some modifications with plasticard and choped some bits off.

The OH-6 was part of a team of helicopters sometimes referred to as a pink team.Scot helicopters were white team and gunships were red teams so the mixed teams became pink teams

Their job was to spot enemies in the field or to get reaction fire  by flying low and slow then they would mark them with a smoke grenade, a gunship that’s was circling higher would then swoop in on a gun run and Finnish the job.

Some OH-6 had miniguns fitted and others relied on the crew chief with an m60 to provide fire support and to drop the smoke where needed.

I went with the m60 option as i could not work out how to make a mini gun to fit but had a 28mm m60 ready to use so i adapted the copilot with cutting and some greenstuff to hold the m60.

I wanted to make a marker that could be used as an objective or a marker for a starting point and think this worked rather well, as it could either be a pinned down unit calling for support on the radio or a unit at the front ordering other squads forward.

I made the crumbling wall out of putty and the tree is an old twig with some green stuff roots.

These two dudes are sergeant burns and pfc noble from war-games illustrated they are more movie spec miniatures but they look cool and that’s all that matters with toy soldiers.

I think i found them at the colours show at Newbury last time it was on before the event…..