It was a hot August day in 1991 as I trudged through the heat waves rising from the torrid concrete apron in front of the hangars at Victoria Airport, when I heard the whining wup-wup-wup of a small turbine powered helicopter. Looking up I saw not one, but two darkly camouflaged Canadian Armed Forces CH-136 Kiowa light observation helicopters circling around to land in the display area in front of me. There was something funny about the one helicopter, it appeared to have something attached to both sides of the fuselage. Once the dust settled and the crew exited and began to button their aircraft up, I wandered over to have a look. A Kiowa with teeth? What we had here was an armed Jetranger! Supported by a bridgework of struts, were two sets of rocket tubes attached to the diminutive chopper. In addition I noted that this helicopter also sported some interesting tactical lumps and bumps which added to the warlike configuration.

A year later Esci released the neat little kit of the OH-58A Kiowa and I entertained thoughts of modeling that aggressive Kiowa I’d seen at the Victoria airshow the summer before. It wasn’t until this year that I finally got around to opening up one of the half dozen of the kits on my shelf to have a go at it.

"Petite" is an apt description for this kit. The Kiowa/Jetranger is not a large aircraft by any means, and when reduced to 1/72 scale, it is positively minute. Molded in a dark olive green plastic, the kits 53 parts display a reasonable level of detail, however, it appears that the "Airfix Rivetter" has found his way to Italy. The actual helicopter is finished with round headed rivets, as streamlining is not an essential feature for most rotary-winged aircraft, but the kit’s representation of those rivets makes it look like a refugee from the boiler works! In general though, the parts are crisply molded and quite useable, and are quite accurate dimensionally for my standards. Clear parts are a bit thick and lense-like, but with a bit of polishing are quite acceptable.

There is ample scope here for the super-detailer however, as the kit’s cockpit is quite barren. The kit provides separate doors which could be glued open to display the interior, which lures the modeller into attempting at least some amount of additional detailing.

Watch out for a poor fit at the main interior bulkhead - there is a 2mm. gap all around the edge at the inside of the fuselage parts, and be careful how you align it - it should slope slightly to the rear - following the angle of the back of the front doors.

With reference to my file photos and copies out of the Bell Jetranger Maintenance Manual, I noticed a number of omissions and corrections that I thought were needed:

-add the rudder (yaw) pedals

-add collective levers on the left side of each front seat

-add the upper (ceiling) instrument panel/switch console

-replace the main bulkhead with a sheet plastic version that fits better inside the fuselage - basically about 2mm. bigger all around than the kit part

-add instrument consoles between the front seats

-revise the main instrument panel to be a more accurate layout to match the example you are modeling

-add a number of boxes, fire extinguishers, door handles, wires, pouches and fiddly bits to your own taste - the cockpit is a rather busy place and needs some "stuff" added to bring it to life.

Since I was modeling a Canadian Military machine, I also added the ever present quilted blanket that is usually found on most interior surfaces and ceilings of these helicopters. I scribed some lead foil in a diamond pattern and painted it a flat metallic grey. Then I cut out sections and glued them onto various areas of the interior with Zap-A-Gap to match photos from my files.

I also scratchbuilt the rear seat from sheet plastic as the kit did not provide one. A few interior details were added from scratchbuilt "fiddly bits" - intercom box and dangling wires, accessory instruments and wires on the sides of the main instrument panel pod, fire extinguisher, door release handles and a few other bits and pieces that were visible in my set of "walk-around" photos I’d taken at the airshow.

The pilots’ seats as supplied in the kit were not even a close match to the photos I had of the real things, so with a couple of evenings worth of time and some sheet plastic, I made my own. Seatbelts were added with painted strips of lead foil glued into place, with some photo etched buckles.

In spite of the bits of detail I added, I still found the interior was a bit sparse, so I dug out a Hasegawa 1/72 Ground Support Equipment Set (kit no. X72-7) and obtained a flight bag and two helmets. The helmets had to be made by cutting the heads off two of the Hasegawa pilot figures and then using a drill and a small dental burr to hollow them out.

I painted the helmets and the flight bag and then glued them on to the interior as if the pilots had just doffed them and buttoned the aircraft up while they went for coffee. It really helped add a bit more realism and interest to the model.

Before I glued the fuselage halves together, I added some flattened wads of lead foil to the nose area under the cockpit floor in order to insure the model sat solidly on the skids. I was worried about the weight of the tail boom and wanted to make sure it didn’t want to tip backwards onto the tail skid.

The interior was painted with a flat medium grey colour, with just enough of a tonal difference from the quilted blanket to match my photos. I glued the overhead windows and rear door windows in place prior to joining the fuselage halves, and I coloured the transparent green overhead windows with a few thick coats of the clear green carrier fluid from a bottle of Testors Jade Green Metallic paint, applied to the interior surface. Another thing I noticed was that the jet-pipes had to be glued in from the inside of the fuselage so I carefully drilled them out and removed the molding seams before sticking them in with some Zap-A-Gap. I couldn’t see any other way of adding them later, so it was going to make for a bit of a tricky job dealing with the upper fuselage seam and painting them afterward.

One the fuselage was glued together with Zap-A-Gap (geez I like the speed with which one can assemble a model with these instant glues!), I cleaned up the seams and glued in the windshield bubble and lower nose glazing. Starting with some 1200 grit sandpaper, I carefully blended the clear windows into the fuselage and then using finer grades of polishing cloths from the LMG brand polishing kit, I polished the clear parts and surrounding fuselage to a high gloss, blending the clear windows into the surface of the model. Now all I needed to do was to cut out ‘masks’ to cover the windows before I painted the model.

There are a few little corrections and additions that are needed before getting out the paint though. I cut out and boxed in a small square housing under the nose to accept the landing lamp, drilled out the locations for the red anti-collision beacons, drilled a hole in the nose to accept a pitot tube, added the exterior door hinges and door handles and added the tail rotor drive shaft cover. There is also a prominent deflection rail that runs along the front of the centre windshield frame, which I added with a length of stretched sprue.

Final steps are gluing on the vertical tail-fin and horizontal stabilizers and drilling a number of small mounting holes in the fuselage to accept the struts that support the rocket tubes.

During breaks from assembling the cockpit and fuselage, I glued the main rotor pieces together and prepared the rest of the other exterior parts for painting. The landing skids and side rails had their molding seams removed, the tail rotor was sanded to a thinner profile and then painted, and the main rotor mast was thinned down and painted with Humbrol Aluminum.

I made up the rocket tube sets from Contrail brand styrene tubes, bits and pieces of 0.010" and 0.015" sheet plastic, small lengths of wire and stretched sprue. The lower support struts that fasten to the landing skid supports on the bottom of the fuselage were made from brass rods that I’d Zap-A-Gapped together, while the upper struts were made from styrene rod.

These sub-assemblies were painted, detailed and left aside until after the basic model was painted, decalled and sealed with Dullcote. This is usually a wise move on my part as it is a sure thing that I will accidentally knock off something during the masking and painting process of the main model. I have found over the years, through painful experience, that it is best to build the model up from subassemblies (a bunch of smaller models). Yes, it does call for a bit more care during the final attachment of the sub-assemblies, but some initial preparation work consisting of pre-drilling locating holes and locating pins helps ease any difficulty.

The rocket tubes and support struts were painted with matte olive drab and gloss NATO green respectively to match the photos I was using as reference as well as to provide some realistic differences in tone and texture. Further details were added with aluminum paint "band clamps" on the ends of the struts, some small stenciling from an old Microscale decals sheet, and some holes drilled to accept some "Remove Before Flight" pins with flags that I could add later.

With the rocket tube assemblies painted and left aside with the tail rotor, main rotor, and landing skids, the helicopter itself could now be finished.

I cut out masking tape shapes to match the windows (using an unbuilt kit as a template) and then ‘shooed’ the family out of the house for a couple of hours of uninterrupted airbrushing with my noisy old diaphragm compressor. I applied the light green first (Testors Model Master Interior Green FS34151) and when that was dry, on went my own mix of the brownish green darker camouflage colour. According to my references (one of which is the official Canadian Armed Forces painting instructional drawing) the correct colour to use should be 1-GP-12c 503-301, which is very close to FS34084. However, as I could not match this using locally available enamels, I regressed to the "old ways" and mixed up a suitably drab browny-green to match the photos.

The paint was a flattish semi-gloss finish that required some clear gloss overcoating in order to provide a ‘decal friendly’ surface. Two good coats of Testors Glosscote were enough to get a nice hard shine, and the model was left to dry in a dust free environment for the rest of the day.

The primary source of the black low visibility national insignia was Arrow Graphics sheet number B-4-72. The serial numbers were clipped from an old, out of production Sabre decals sheet. A bit of gentle persuasion with some Solvaset made sure the decals smuggled down onto the surface without silvering.

Once the decals were dry (about 24 hours) I sprayed on some Testor’s Dullcote through my airbrush to blend-in the decals and to tone-down the gloss finish. My photographs showed that the aircraft had a slight semigloss sheen, so I kept myself from getting carried away with the flat finish and found that 3 light coats imparted a realistic looking dull shine.

Later that day, when the paint and Dullcote were dry, I carefully removed the window masking by first running the tip of a #11 X-Acto knife blade around the edges, very lightly, to break the paint edge, and then peeled off the masking tape shapes.

The last step was to glue on the rocket tubes and add some of the small final details. I used small lengths of fine wire as locating pins for the rocket tube struts. Using a #80 pin drill, I created holes in the ends of the styrene upper struts and drilled matching holes in the side of the fuselage and the rocket tube support housing. The first step was to glue the ends of the "M" struts into the notches formed by the landing skid cross braces and the belly of the helicopter using white glue to allow some flexibility while I located and glued on the fuselage side struts into the previously drilled holes to create a solid "bridge". I’d already spent a few evenings creating a jig and test fitting the whole thing together so I would end up with the correct angles and strut lengths before committing the glue though!

The red anti-collision beacons were fabricated from stubs of stretched clear red sprue (another good reason to build the odd car model!) glued into pre-drilled holes in the upper and lower fuselage mounting locations. I made the pitot tube from a small length of fine wire with a bit of the insulation stripped off and glued into a hole I’d previously drilled into the nose. The landing lamp cover was a small square of some clear shrink-wrap material that I cut out from one of the many un-built and un-opened kits behind me on my storage shelves, and glued on with some diluted white glue. The actual landing lamp was made from a small disk of aluminum foil which I’d white glued into the boxed-in recess on the underside of the nose.

The last little bit of weathering was added with some dark grey washes applied to the doors and engine "doghouse" and some highlighting with a soft leaded graphite pencil. I like to use the softest Artists pencil I can find - usually a 6B with a large enough lead that I can carve it into a chisel shape or a fine point to suit the application.

It was time to sit back and admire my efforts. I had a neat little model to add to my collection, and the addition of the rocket tubes really made it stand out. I could now easily reminisce about that warm August weekend, and the many rolls of film I’d blasted off, and the great holiday the whole Airshow event became.

REFERENCES:

Personal files photos.

      Canadian Department of National Defence Official painting and finishing drawings  for the CH-136 Kiowa Helicopter