For this time, I’m going to make a Russian plastic model Zvezda Hind attack helicopter. This is a kit that I reserved as soon as it was released in 2020. I have had a lot of difficulties with the Eastern Europe kit a long time ago, but this kit is new, so I hope it will be easier to assemble. Isn’t it the Russian Army? The marking helicopter I want to make is the one from 1988. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union was around 1990, the Soviet Army is still alive and well.
The first step is to assemble the cockpit. According to the instructions, the inside of the cockpit will be assembled gradually, and the instrument panel on the front will be a little later. I want to assemble and paint this area all at once.
I can’t find this small part in the middle, which is not supposed to be separated from runner G. In the worst case scenario, I thought I would have to make it by myself, but I found it when I looked in the trash in the kitchen where I threw away the plastic bag containing the runner. This plastic bag is semi-transparent and has a lot of letters on it, so it was hard to check the inside. I thought I should check carefully when I throw away the bags related to parts. This part is small, but it is a very important part as it is the rotating shaft of the rotor base. It was dangerous.
The space for airborne soldiers in the back and the base of the main rotor were combined.
I feel very sorry for Zvezda because they reproduced the inside, but I think I will close the main panel this time. The engine is reproduced and the parts fit well.
The fuselage parts are divided into left and right. It’s huge… The rotor is also pretty large.
I was worried if it would really fit properly because I was able to make a temporary arrangement. After trial and error, I found the perfect position by chance, so I marked it with a oil-based marker.
I glued square transparent windows and painted the inside of the helicopter, and painted the cockpit and other parts in black.
(2024/07/24)
In the cockpit, I start from the place where I can do it. A lot of decals make up for the fact that there are many meters and switches in front, back, left and right. The sheet and the floor are black, and the part where the decal is to be attached will look more like it with a light blue-gray color. The quality of the decal looks very good.
It came with a pilot and a gunner, but I didn’t use it this time. I brought some seatbelt parts from somewhere and added them to make it look like that. I think I can see it through the canopy so if we understand roughly, it will be OK.
These are clear parts that were in Zvezda’s Hind. Is the transparency not good enough? The texture is similar to the clear parts of AFV Club. If I put thinner on the transparent part, it will become cloudy, right? Last time, the clear parts of MENG had high transparency and was very beautiful, so I have an impression that it is a little inferior to that. I think the selling point of this kit is the power of the body, so clear parts are not a problem. Of course, it’s perfectly usable.
I commented above that the quality of the decal must be good. I think it is very good that the fine characters are printed properly. The color is also very beautiful. I bought this kit in 2020, but I’m only making it now. Since I stocked up on a lot of things, I made them slowly, but they are still full in the closet. Zion can fight for another 10 years. I mean, it’s hard to see small things while I’m working. I think it was good to pile up a little because the price of the plastic model kits has risen due to the weak Japanese yen.
It looks like this is well reproduced when I attach the decal of the meter.
This is a Hind fuselage with the left and right sides joined together without any protruding parts. The image of a vicious attack helicopter I saw in a movie is wide, but it’s slender than I expected. In most Western movies, novels and dramas, Hind is a villain when it appears. The story of the Pineapple Army Comic was impressive. The width of the body is also smart. It looks like a fish from the side. It’s a little bit like the side view of a Goby that’s just in season.
Hind helicopters, T-90 tanks, Terminator AFV vehicles, and the like are all pretty cool things, but I’ve always felt psychologically uncomfortable building weapons that are currently in use. But I didn’t see much sign of the end of it, so I switched to making whatever I wanted to make. If I think about it a lot, I can’t make a lot of modern weapons. Even weapons that would otherwise have been considered retired have been put to use. My plastic model stock won’t decrease. I feel that there are many modern tank and airplane kits are big boxes.
(2024/07/28)
The fuselage has many curved surfaces and many parts, so I thought it would be hell if the parts didn’t fit well. Contrary to what I expected, I wonder if the recent Zvezda kit has improved a lot. The fit of the parts is very good even for the parts that are quite sharp and complicated. Even so, there are some things that are not right because of my lack of skill. Anyway, my impression is that the difficulty level is not so different from when making Hasegawa kits.
Other than tires and weapons, I have assembled the parts including small parts. The rest of the parts are very different from the color of the aircraft, so I think it’s better to paint them before gluing them. There are so many.
On the inside is a launcher capable of carrying 80 mm x 20 rockets, 4B-8V20A, on the outside is 9K114 Sturm, the NATO code name is AT-6 Spiral. Including the machine guns on the nose of the helicopter, having so many of them is a powerful weapon.
I don’t think I can make it well because the canopy is too complicated. It would be good if I could recover the areas that cannot be helped by filling in the putty while minimizing the gaps.
It’s a difficult kit, so I’m worried if I can put it together properly until the end, and I want to move on. It keeps the building pace in a weird way. But the pace has slowed down a lot recently. It’s very hot and I watch the Olympics all the time.
I also built the main rotor and the tail rotor. Since it’s large, I thought about inserting the rotor blades so that they can be removed, but this part is quite complicated and hard to make it an insertion type, so I glued all 5 blades together. It’s pretty big.
Painting seems to have many processes including rotors and weapons. For the time being, I started little by little from what I could do.
(2024/08/03)
I primed it with black once. It is hard to paint the bright green after the black process unless it is to leave shadows.
I use a lot of colors, so there are a lot of masking processes.
With 1/48, I used a lot of paint because the area to be painted was large. Even more so because I blew bright colors from black. I didn’t do much shadow blowing this time.
Basic painting has been completed up to camouflage painting. I used gray-green and khaki green. The rest is how many decals there are. As it is a relatively new kit, it seems to have plenty of caution marks, and it seems to require a lot of work. It’s finally starting to look like a Hind attack helicopter.
(2024/08/09)
There are a lot of decals, but roughly there are four types: large troop marks and nationality marks, weapons decals, aircraft caution marks, and small rotor decals. I pasted it little by little while watching the Olympics.
The decal on the back of the main rotor is realistic and amazing. It’s hard to see when it’s displayed, but since the base is black and the letters are white, even small letters stand out.
(2024/08/17)
The Mi-24V, the Hind, is complete. The Hind is a Soviet Russian attack helicopter with the troop carrying capacity to carry one infantry squad of eight men into its cabins. A U.S. attack helicopter would be a little smaller, but it would be a lot bigger if it served as both a transport and an attack.
As it turned out during the build, the two engines are placed side by side directly below the main rotor. If it gets hit, the rotor base will be blown off and it will be difficult to make an emergency landing.
Six pylons, three on each side of the stub wing, can be equipped with large anti-tank missiles and rocket pods. This time, I got an army full of rockets.
I think too much washing paint is left on the door part. However, if the panel lines are not visible to some extent, it becomes monotonous on a large scale, so it is difficult to control it.
As you can see, it will be quite large when it is finished, so I wanted to make it compact by putting the blades in, but the structure of the rotor base was quite complicated, so I couldn’t make it into an insert type. With five blades, it took a lot of space to fix the rotor at any angle.
Marking is a 1988 unit, the 262nd Separate Helicopter Squadron, now at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan. It is probably a unit of the limited contingent during the war in Afghan Soviet War.
The main rotor is bent by the weight from the beginning, so I thought it was made well. I wonder if old kits reproduce this kind of thing. Anyway, it looks pretty cool when I put it together until the end.
A nationality mark of a big red star is pasted on the underside of the aircraft in light blue.
There are quite a lot of decals on the back of the blades.
This helicopter kit has been in stock for a long time and I have been thinking of making one someday, but it seems difficult and I have not been able to do it. This time, I closed most of the parts, but I’m glad I could finish it. I understood the shape and structure of the Hind a little.
(2024/08/19)
