Kitty Hawk 1/48 Bell UH-1H Iroquois

with ResKit resin interior, rotor mast, tail rotor, guns, exhaust and Werner’s Wings decals

174th Assault Helicopter Company, US Army, Vietnam 1968

I’m sure I’ve remarked before that some projects just produce a natural focus point for the model. This is one such model. It’s all about the aftermarket interior and rivets. Lots of rivets.

Helicopter modellers rejoiced in 2017 when Kitty Hawk released a new tool UH-1D in 1/48. Kitty Hawk are (were?) a company with a mixed reputation at best, but this kit was considered a Good One. Accuracy and fit are generally fine and the detail is excellent.

There are tons of markings provided in the box, for several Vietnam airframes as well as later Hueys from Japan, Germany and Taiwan. Although marketed as a UH-1D, in reality the kit’s schemes are for a mix of D and H variants; the latter differed by engine type and had no nose pitot or antenna. As such, you need to have your wits about you to make sure you use all the correct parts since the instructions offer no guidance at all.

I acquired this kit in 2018 and over the intervening years obtained as much ResKit aftermarket as I could, more though accident than by design as one always needs to ask for something at Christmas and birthdays. This included resin guns, exhaust, tail rotor and main rotor, but the real highlight was the full interior set, which comprises a ton of resin parts cast from 3D printed masters and a couple of sheets of PE.

You know you’re in for some fun when the manufacturer wishes you luck!

This interior is really aftermarket to put hairs on one’s chest, and I am immensely thankful to YouTuber Hammerhead Models for his video on using this set. Had I not watched it, I would not have been forewarned, and if you have this set, you definitely need to be forewarned. In many ways it is an excellent product, but it was produced pre-Covid with (in ResKit’s words) the best technology they had at the time, and things have moved on a lot since then. The main challenge is releasing a lot of extremely fragile and fine parts from some very substantial moulding blocks with extensive moulding flash, and this requires creativity and forethought. I used a wide variety of tools – razor saws, a variety of scribers, new scalpel blades of different shapes, drills – to take a very long time to remove each part. I started with the hardest components, which were the ultra-fine seat frames, on the basis that if I couldn’t get these done, I’d abandon the seats altogether. Light pressure and many, many passes were necessary.

The most difficult parts to remove from the casting blocks were the seat frames.
The seats themselves are PE moulded over a template supplied by ResKit. Annealing the brass makes it more pliable.
The centre seats had warped frames that also were a challenge to clean up. Dunking the parts in boiling water restored their shape.
A completed seat on the left and components for the other all laid out. It’s a model in itself!

Over several days I slowly released each part, and each part released was a satisfying victory. Most of the frames did get broken somewhere, but in a manner easily fixed with a dab of superglue. With a complete set of frames, I could anneal the brass ‘fabric’ seats with a lighter and mould them over the resin buck supplied by ResKit. There is a small mountain of seat belts to make, and as for most of the PE components, I elected to solder the parts together where I could.

I love soldering PE, partly for the challenge and satisfaction, and partly for the strength of the bond. I use a cheap soldering iron from Amazon and tape the PE parts to a jeweller’s soldering mat with Kapton tape, which is heat resistant. This fixes the parts in place and allows me to use tiny fragments of solder cut from a reel and tacked in place with Nokorode Soldering Flux Paste.

There are tons of PE belts, each made of several parts. I soldered them together for strength. The background is a soldering mat.
These are the belts for most of the cabin seats. There were still more to do!
I carefully pre-bent the belts over the seat template before attaching them to the seat frames with CA.
An early test fit of the major components was essential.

Hammerhead’s video warned me that test-fitting all the interior components was essential every step of the way. The resin floor, rear bulkhead and roof fit together fairly intuitively, but there are a couple of resin stanchions to also fit and some PE pillars, which look terrifying. One of the stanchions snapped during a test fit, and I decided to just replace them with brass tubing and soldered the PE fittings to them. This was a good decision as it made for a much more robust assembly.

The biggest anticipated problem was getting the instrument panel coaming to not foul the windscreen and upper nose. I suspect this might be a problem even if you use the kit part, and I did lots of test fits to ensure everything would join up as it should. I found the easiest solution was a combination of moving the entire centre console aft by about 2mm (which is as far as it will go before interfering with the cyclics) and removing material from the back of the coaming. The forward fuselage assembly is fairly complex, with the front doors, windscreen, upper nose, fuselage and nose windows all having to come together in just the right way. Eventually I managed it.

This showed the instrument panel interfered with the fit of the windscreen and nose.

By moving the whole instrument console aft 2mm and sanding the rear of the coaming I could get the panel to fit.
The fit of the rear bulkhead on the starboard side was really good, but…
…on the port side there was a huge gap. This was filled later with plastic strip.
The anti-torque pedals are exquisite and even bear the ‘BELL HUEY’ legends.
I ended up replacing the resin cabin stanchions with brass tubing for strength.
The soldered brass stanchions are much stronger than the resin items, one of which I’d accidentally snapped.
As with most of the parts, I needed to be creative with using the best tools to release them from the moulding blocks. These are the collectives.

At some point along the way I lost the rear centre seat frame. One day I had it, and the next I didn’t and in desperation I emailed ResKit to ask if they had any spares lying around. It turned out they didn’t, but remarkably one of the designers messaged me to say they had dragged out the old CAD and would print me a replacement. A couple of weeks later, several of these parts arrived – now that’s customer service! The printed part was much finer and easier to use than the original cast parts, enough that if ResKit ever re-released this set in 3D printed form, I would consider buying it and doing a UH-1D.

Amazing customer service: I lost a seat frame, and ResKit 3d printed a replacement for me and sent spares. Incredible.

I couldn’t get the PE instrument panel to fit in the resin coaming, so some thinning of the resin lip was required. I also decided not to use the supplied acetate film dials, but rather apply some dial decals from ANYZ and Airscale once the panel was painted. After these had been covered with discs punched from clear acetate, I rather liked the final effect.

ResKit’s PE panel is a little too large for their resin coaming.
The problem was solved with some careful chiselling of the coaming lip.
After painting the panel, dial decals from ANYZ and Airscale were added and covered with discs punched from acetate.
Catching the light for that authentic dial glint!

The interior is incredibly complex, and the centre cabin seats and pilot seats were the most complex assemblies of all. I confess that I did not use all of the tiny PE parts in the end, but I did have tremendous fun soldering the armoured PE panels for the pilot seats together. Some painting was done before installation, and some afterwards. Access to all these parts is difficult, so when to paint and when to glue took careful planning.

I also soldered together the frames for the pilots’ seats. Kapton tape is better than Tamiya tape to secure the parts to the soldering mat.
As with all the other seats, those for the pilots are fragile and have lots of flash to remove.
Beginning to test fit various components. The PE framework for the nose is very exposed and fragile.

The final parts of the interior jigsaw were those PE pillars that unite the roof and floor behind the pilot seats. Besides being incredibly flimsy, installing them so there were no gaps anywhere was impossible for me. I did the best I could – and fortunately where they meet the floor is not that visible – but in the end I got them in, even if I’m not quite sure how.

This is the roof upside down. The vertical PE pillars are the most difficult parts of the set to install.
Constant test-fitting was necessary to check everything would work.
Kitty Hawk used multi-part moulds for the fuselage sides, so the resultant moulding lines need to be removed.
Test fit with the rotor base in place. It would turn out this was buried too deep in the fuselage.
Here’s that gap at the rear bulkhead filled with plastic strip and CA. This is still in the test-fitting stage.
Installing the vertical seat components by dry-fitting the bases. I used Tamiya tape for the seat attachments in lieu of the supplied PE.
I painted and weathered the floor and walls of the cabin before installing the seating.

Some close ups of the interior parts prior to installation.

The main cabin seating all installed. The centre seats could face to the front, rear or sides.

Images of the interior all finished and installed.

Whilst I had been fiddling with the interior, I’d been working on other parts. ResKit’s main rotor is a pretty complex assembly, and despite my best efforts I couldn’t quite get all the parts to unite properly. It also doesn’t seem to work that well with the interior set because when I was done, the base of the rotor mount sat way too low in the fuselage, and also too far aft, meaning I had to butcher some of the kit parts to get it to fit. The design makes it hard to get the two blades lined up with each other. Mine weren’t quite parallel, and I was prepared to live with it until I accidentally snapped a blade off late on in the project, and pinning it back on again afforded me to the opportunity to ensure they were straight second time around. On my next Kitty Hawk Huey I intend to use the kit parts and see if the difference from the aftermarket is really that noticeable.

Whilst the masters were 3d printed, the supplied parts are cast resin, with some chunky pour blocks.

ResKit’s main rotor hub is very nice, but I could not get the parts to join properly, so some of the various actuators are just floating in space rather than connected at both ends!

The bottom section of the rotor hub painted prior to installation.
I don’t know how this happened, but I could not get this part to fit with the ResKit rotor hub without resorting to surgery to remove plastic.
The result is not accurate, but this was the only way I could get it to fit. For some reason, the rotor mount is too far aft by several millimetres, but I couldn’t see why.

ResKit’s tail rotor and exhaust are simple additions. The guns, on the other hand, are right at the limit of what I can cope with, especially the very tiny PE parts that need to be added to the resin gun bodies. Bending the trigger mechanisms was a case of taking a deep breath and hoping for the best; I could barely see what I was doing, but the final result wasn’t bad. The bigger problem with this set is that I could not get the gun mounts to fit the fuselage sides at all, and I gave up on using any locating holes and pegs. The final geometry is thus not very accurate. Most Hueys on the ground show the guns stowed pointing downwards, which was easy enough to pose by installing the tiny PE gun mount in this orientation. ResKit provide some lovely metal ammo belt feeders, but since I couldn’t see these on many photos, I didn’t use them.

ResKit’s guns were very bendy, but dunking them in boiling water straightened them out.

The ResKit guns assembled. The PE parts are terrifyingly small and difficult to bend, especially the triggers.
In test fitting I could not get the ResKit gun brackets to attach as they should. In the end I fitted them flush, which is inaccurate, but at least doesn’t have parts floating in mid-air.

I had one excellent photo of the airframe I was modelling which allowed me to determine which kit parts to miss off: the wire cutters (part C50), roof aerial (C45), part C30, the ‘rails’ around the windscreen (B23/24) and the large roof-mounted blade antenna (C4). The latter is a strange omission as it was present on every single UH-1D/H I looked at, including 17543 at other stages of its life. It’s definitely not in the photo though!

Kitty Hawk provide quite a few engine parts and the engine cowling doors can be posed open. I don’t like exposed engines in general, so closed everything up but did include the engine in case it was visible through the PE screens fitted to the cowling doors. It wasn’t.

In places the sprue gates are thick and impinge on the parts, as on these engine cowls.
The engine cowls cleaned up and the kit PE applied. Some of the CA has yet to be sanded down.

I now turn to the other major feature of this project: the rivets. It is de rigueur for helicopter to kits to have recessed rivets, even when the real thing usually had nice raised rivets, and I understand why this is. But a few years ago, I saw French modeller extraordinaire Fanch Lubin making a 1/35 SH-60 on Facebook, and he used 0.3mm solder balls placed in each recessed rivet hole to reproduce raised rivets. I thought it was mad, and knew I would have to try this one day. At Scale Model Challenge last October, UK modeller extraordinaire Andy Evans described how he was using this method on his H-60, and I was convinced: the time had come to do this in 1/48.

The first thing I needed were solder balls. After a short perusal of eBay, I had ordered bottles allegedly each containing 12,500 solder balls from 0.25-0.6mm in 0.05mm increments for about £12. Andy’s method was to dip them in Johnson’s Klear and then manipulate them into each hole with a brush. I experimented on the kit doors (which were going to be discarded anyway) using the 0.25mm and 0.3mm sizes. The method worked well, but the 0.3mm balls were a bit too big and not terribly robust after painting. I started with the 0.25mm diameter on the tail boom.

Testing 0.3 and 0.25mm solder balls on the unused doors. In the end I wish I’d used 0.2mm balls as the smaller the better in 1/48.
I then stress-tested the solder rivets by priming them and seeing how resilient they were to touching and masking.

There are a couple of complicating factors. One is that the moulded rivet holes are not consistent in diameter or depth across the airframe, even along the same run of rivets. A second is that the Johnson’s Klear can thicken up quite fast and leaves a lumpy surface finish. After getting more experienced at application, I discovered it was critical to keep the Klear quite fresh and to apply as little as possible. Rather than dipping the balls in the Klear, I dabbed a tiny amount of Klear in the hole and then used a very fine brush with some Klear on it to pick each ball up (I decanted them into a small dish) and locate it in the hole. The ball tends to get ‘sucked’ into the hole quite easily, except near the edges of parts where the rivets holes tend to be a bit washed out and lack depth.

I started with the tail, which I kept separate from the main body, and also after I’d cleaned up all the seams. The applied solder balls are fragile, so I wanted to minimise handling once they had been added. When the tail was done I was struck by how overscale the rivets were. It is inevitable that they would be – true scale rivets are impossible in 1/48 – but the rest of the main fuselage was done with 0.2mm balls, which are slightly better. This did not take as long as I feared and was a very satisfying process.

Installing the solder balls for real on the elevators. These are 0.25mm balls stuck in place with Johnson’s Klear. The balls are on the lid of the centre pot – you can barely see them!
The completed underside of an elevator.

With the rivets done on the tail, I assembled the main fuselage. Getting the doors, windscreen and roof together was difficult, I suspect because of the aftermarket interior. Some strip plastic and filler helped, and you can make life easier for yourself if you open the front doors. Careful planning was necessary to ensure seams were dealt with before the rivets were applied to the main body. On the roof I filled the recessed rivets where the black walkway marking was going to go.

Underside seam filled and sanded with black CA. Kitty Hawk pay more attention to the underside than most manufacturers who make helicopters. The retracted lights are a nice touch and backed with Bare Metal Foil.
I suspect the fit was thrown out by the aftermarket interior, but the front doors needed some plastic strip to close gaps.
A rare occasion where a Berna clamp actually worked to help glue the windscreen in place.

Frequent test-fitting keeps the vision alive. The tail boom, rotor and skids are all dry-fitted here.

Back to adding loads of tiny balls! I kept with 0.25mm balls for the underside and tail boom, but wished I’d used 0.2mm instead.
The fit of the lower nose windows was poor, with a substantial lip between the clear and opaque plastic parts.
After filling, priming and rescribing, the nose looks much better.
At this join between the window and nose there was a large gap that was latter filled with CA.
Gap filled and rivet holes reinstated with an RB Productions riveting wheel.
And with the nose riveted. This time I used 0.2mm balls (and on the fuselage sides and roof). 0.25mm balls were used for the window frame, as these are larger in real life.
The downside of using Klear as the rivet adhesive is it leaves the surface lumpy (as per the right elevator). This is ameliorated by a thick coat of VMS Matt Varnish (left).

0.2mm solder balls used to rivet the roof and fuselage sides. The rivet holes where the walkway markings would go were filled with Mr Surfacer 500.

Keeping the tail and main body separate for the time being (to minimise damage to the rivets), I embarked on painting. This aircraft had a new starboard front door, in a much lighter green, and some yellow panelling on the tail, as well as orange upper elevator surfaces and a white and blue tail stripe, all of which were very appealing to me. I primed the model with Mr Metal Primer in an effort to make the paint stick better to the metal rivets, although I’m not sure if it really made any difference. Over this went a healthy coat of Mr Mahogany Surfacer 1000.

This revealed that lumpy surface where the Johnson’s Klear had been applied around each rivet. In experimenting with some thick coats of VMS Matt Varnish I discovered this lumpiness could be made to ‘disappear’, but the next time I try this method I will experiment with a different adhesive for the rivets which I hope will give a smoother finish.

Again, the Klear leaves a lumpy surface around these 0.25mm balls on the tail boom.
The lumpiness is improved (but not entirely removed) by some VMS Matt.
Fear of masking too much over the metal rivets meant I had to plan the order of painting carefully. The rotor housing has already been done and then masked for the black walkway.

I was extremely nervous about masking the tail stripe and borders around the nose windows, since the tape would be applied directly over the rivets. My fear was removal of both rivet and/or paint when the masking was taken off, and I thus gingerly applied the Tamiya tape. In the event I lost one rivet, which was easily replaced. I’m sure if you went over the finished model with a magnifying glass you would find a couple of missing or misplaced rivets, but the overall effect was enough for me.

With the walkway safely masked, I finally cemented the tail boom to the fuselage. Note I’ve already painted and masked the tail markings.

Mr Color 304 was the main shade used for the Olive Drab. Directly onto this paint I used decals from Werner’s Wings. Again, I was nervous of this, because the UNITED STATES ARMY legends and serial numbers on the tail would need to settle over some pretty large rivets. In the event, my fears were completely unfounded and these decals settled down incredibly well over the surface detail by simply floating them on in a puddle of Mr Mark Setter. The Werner’s Wings set is primarily a stencil set with some corrected markings for the kit options. The nose art needed to come from the kit, and over the complex curve of the nose, this settled down well: WHEN YOUR (sic) OUT OF SCHLITZ YOUR (sic) OUT OF BEER…THIS FISH SWIMS IN BOOZE with the gun totting dolphin that characterised 174th AHC ‘slicks’.

Base painting done and rotor and skids dry-fitted in place. Masking around the rivets was stressful, but generally successful.
The 0.2mm balls look much better here than the larger rivets on the tail.
Masking the tail stripes was more successful than anticipated. I did lose one rivet on the other side (later replaced)!
This airframe was fitted with a new door at some point, which was much lighter in colour. (The overspray was corrected later.)
I missed a row of rivets and added them after paint, which afforded a nice opportunity to see how they stand out against the Olive Drab.
Werner’s Wings decals were incredible. Printed by Microscale, they had no problems settling over the rivets with minimal setting solution (in this case, Mr Mark Setter).

Decals all added. The nose art needs to come from the kit, and it was fine.

I kept the weathering fairly light to avoid damage to the rivets. Final assembly consisted of adding some tiny PE parts under the fuselage, attaching the skids (make sure you get the front and rear cross members the right way round – they’re both labelled A26, but are not the same!), followed by the guns and rotors.

I had tremendous fun with this project and I’d do it all again. The ResKit aftermarket is truly challenging, but very rewarding, and the basic kit is good enough. I loved adding the rivets, and if I can find a better cement, I think I could love it more. I’ve already started the Kitty Hawk UH-1N and need to buy more solder balls.

Year bought: 2018 (eBay)

Year built: 2026 (New Addington, Croydon)

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