Revell 1/48 Bell UH-1C Iroquois

with Lone Star Models (Cobra Company) resin correction set, Mini World metal miniguns and Print Scale decals

114th Assault Helicopter Company, US Army, Vietnam 1968

Considering it’s probably the most iconic helicopter of the 20th century, if not all time, the classic single engine Vietnam-era Huey has been spectacularly overlooked in 1/48. For the later model D/H, there is the Kitty Hawk kit (which I shall embark on next), but for the smaller A/B/C/E pioneering versions, there’s very little. There’s the Hobby Boss kit, which is super-simplified and has the wrong rotor system, or this: the ancient Monogram kit, also branded by Revell, as here. And it’s a terrible kit.

It’s not often I make a kit older than me (this harks back to 1977), and on the back of Tamiya’s 2024 F-35C, which is one of the most advanced injection-moulded kits around, it was a very rude shock. Moulded in dark green plastic, which is such a ‘joy’ to work with, the Revell boxing I’d bought for the princely sum of £7.99 in 2005 was riddled with flash. This was advertised as the ‘UH-1 Huey Hog’ and the markings professed to allow one to make either a UH-1C or a UH-1E. This is a lie.

Early versions of the Iroquois underwent a number of changes, which don’t all neatly map onto the model designators. The C and E were gunships and basically similar, the latter being the US Navy or Marines version and generally fitted with a hoist (not provided in this boxing), but differed significantly from the B. This kit is a mishmash of various features that need to be carefully parsed out.

The most obvious of these is the tail. The C/E (and some Bs later in life) gained a broader chord tail with navigation lights mounted on the side. Monogram give us the early, narrow B tail, with the tail light extending from the trailing edge. Next are the elevators mounted on the tail: the kit gives us the smaller ones from the B; we need broader ones for a C or E. Third, the nose mounted FM homing antennae are also B-model fitments and need to be chopped off; at least that’s easily done. More minor is that fuel filler caps are moulded on both sides of the fuselage as it changed from the B to the C/E; we need to keep the one on the port side and fill the one to starboard.

Some of these issues are not a big deal, but I couldn’t live with the inaccurate tail and elevators. Many years ago, the much-missed Cobra Company released a resin correction set, which fixed these matters, provided some replacement seats with less anaemic armour plate, and a more complete and accurate set of weaponry. Their moulds were taken over by Lone Star Models out of Texas, who haphazardly release the ex-CC sets every so often. In 2018 I managed to buy such a set from them. Let’s just say it covers the basics. The moulding quality is definitely sub-par, and I can’t decide if my memory of how good the Cobra Company sets I used in the 1990s were is simply coloured by what was acceptable back then, or if the moulds really have deteriorated. Air bubbles need to be filled, flash cleaned away, and moulding blemishes removed. It’s a fair amount of work.

The kit ‘B’ style tail on the left; the later ‘C/E’ tail on the right.
The kit-supplied smaller elevators in green, and the correct broad-chord elevators in cream coloured resin.

This was going to be quite a major project of a rather small aircraft, and so I started with the difficult stuff to see if it would be viable. Better to fail early than late. Test-fitting of the resin tail showed it wouldn’t be too bad, just too wide (as mentioned in the instructions). Accordingly, I chopped the kit tail off. The elevators seemed simple enough – they just needed a lot of cleaning up.

The resin tail is too wide. Cobra Company recommend splicing the kit tail to make it wider.
A dry fit shows that the match is pretty good in terms of height. Note blemishes in the resin being fixed with black CA.
The Lone Star seat (left) compared to the kit seat (right). The differences are not huge.
The prongs sticking out from the front belong on the UH-1B, and can be chopped off for a C or E.

Fancy dealing with some flash? And that exhaust pipe is going to be fun to clean up…
Not only flash, but nice big ejection pins to remove as well.
A while ago I purchased some Hobby Elements flash sanding bits. I don’t use them often, but did a lot on this kit, including thinning the exhaust.

More challenging would be the clear parts and the engine. The latter is largely hidden, but Monogram’s philosophy of basically bisecting as much of the aircraft as possible for moulding leaves a nasty and tricky seam to clean up through the exhaust. As with most of the kit, the moulding is ‘wobbly’, and even after a lot of filling and careful sanding, getting a truly circular or symmetrical exhaust outlet was a very tall order. After working pretty hard at this, I realised the kit exhaust was completely inaccurate (it’s far too long) and so hacked it off and replaced it with an unwanted part from the Kitty Hawk UH-1D kit. The bulk of the rest of the engine can be ignored.

Fitting the clear parts proved much more challenging, and this would take way more time than I anticipated. The cabin door windows are pretty clear, but have large gaps around them. I secured them initially with Tamiya Extra Thin, and when cured, filled the gaps with thick, clear CA. I like CA because it sets really hard and is really sticky, so it won’t fall off the model and will polish to a very smooth finish. The disadvantages are that it shrinks a lot, so might take multiple applications, which will produce internal defects between the layers that can’t be eliminated. I decided to plump for it anyway, but ended up adding clear UV resin on top, which can be set with a UV torch. When all was hard, I sanded it down with quite aggressive sanding sticks, working from 400 all the way up to 2500 and finally 4000. The final polish came from using Tamiya compounds (Coarse, Fine and Finish, in that order), applied with cotton wheels chucked into a Proxxon motor tool. This is extremely messy, and a mask and eye protection is recommended. I make sure to use a different buffing wheel for each grade of polish to prevent contamination. The final result is extremely smooth on the surface, but there are some visual defects where the optical properties of the plastic and CA/resin are not identical. In general, these are only really apparent close up.

More ejection pin marks to clean up on the inside of the cabin doors. If you model them open, you don’t have to bother with this.
The clear parts in general do not fit well. There are some pretty huge gaps around the edge of the door windows.
I like a brute force approach: fill the gaps with thick CA and/or clear UV resin.
After sanding and polishing, the window clarity is not bad. The gaps around the edges are filled, but will never quite be as optically clear as the plastic, but it’s close enough for me.
The filler cap on the starboard side can be filled, in this case with black CA.

The cockpit side windows are more difficult, as Monogram moulded both panes together, attached with a huge slab of clear plastic which definitely should not be there. The framing is also very poorly moulded, and the windows are too small. Initially I chose to separate the panes and then deal with them in the same way as the cabin windows. This took a very long time, with several applications of filler required inside and out, and endless sanding and polishing, again inside and out. The final result was so poor I subsequently abandoned this altogether and resorted to removing the window frames from the fuselage halves and replacing the entire upper half of each door with some clear plastic cut from an old CD case. The plastic is thick, but clear enough.

The cockpit side windows are extremely clunky, and are joined by a huge slab of clear plastic. Not very prototypical at all… Also: more flash, and very wonky rivets.
I separated the two window panes and cut off the joining slab before sanding everything flat. In progress is upper left; original kit part is lower right.
The two panes can then be fitted and slathered in thick CA. The windows are too small in this area, but I was never going to fix that.
As with the cabin windows, my fix was never going to be perfect, but at least after a lot of sanding and polishing, it is smooth.

Images of the cleaned up windows in place.
Having decided my efforts with the front windows were inadequate, I decided to replace the upper front doors with clear plastic cut from a CD case.
The corresponding plastic sections were cut away from the kit fuselage halves with a 0.2mm tungsten chisel.
By tracing around the section cut from the kit with a marker pen, I could establish the rough shape I needed to cut the clear plastic to.
With the clear part refined in shape, I could test fit it to the kit by taping all the major parts together.
The front windows glued in place along with the cabin door. Note the huge gaps around the latter (the white strip along the lower lip is the gap!)
The fit of the opposite door is equally bad.

I then turned my attention to the cockpit. Monogram’s instrument panel is actually pretty good for a kit nearly 50 years old, with raised detail and a nice decal to go on top. I wanted to try something new – one of those techniques I’d only seen illustrated in modelling books of old. This technique was usually demonstrated by means of a sketch rather than photos of actual parts, and that always makes me nervous, because things always look way better in an idealised drawing than they do in real life. Would it work in real life?

What I wanted to do was make my own instrument panel from sheet styrene with the dial holes punched out. Easy to say, somewhat more difficult to do, because getting all those holes perfectly lined up is no walk in the park. To stack the odds in my favour, I scanned the kit decal sheet and in Inkscape drew a template of the instrument panel and all the dial locations. I then printed loads of these out and stuck them to a sheet of very thin styrene. Using an RP Toolz micro punch and die set, I then made about eight instrument panels. Lining up the punch over each dial (which varied between 0.7 and 1.1mm) was exceptionally difficult, but the hope was to have one panel that was good enough from the eight. This came to pass, and I was dead chuffed.

After sanding down the raised detail from the kit panel, I painted it black and applied the instrument panel decal. Disappointingly, the decal disintegrated and I lost all the beautiful dial detail I was going to display. Fortunately I had scanned the decals, so I could print out the panel on photo paper, but my scan was rather low-resolution, so the resulting detail was much blurrier than I would have liked, although better than nothing, and the photo paper coating gave a good representation of the plastic dial covers. The panel was further detailed with some PE bezels from an old Reheat sheet. Someone really needs to revive this range.

The kit part (in green) compared to my new instrument panel made from thin plastic sheet – here shown with my computer drawn template stuck over the top, and the kit decal underneath.
Some ancient Reheat PE bezels were glued to my plastic panel. These parts, along with their etched belt buckles, are much-missed.
The finished panel. The dial detail is a bit blurry because the kit decal disintegrated, and this is a printout from a low-res scan I’d made earlier.
The glossy photopaper used to print the instrument panel markings gives a nice finish when it catches the light.
Initially I sanded off all the raised fuselage detail (lower) and rescribed the panel lines (upper), but later decided to fill it all in as the real thing didn’t have recessed detail.

With the instrument panel done, the rest of the interior was finished as from the box, although the front seats were replaced with the marginally better resin ones. I had always planned to build this kit with all the doors closed and so didn’t really care for accuracy or detail on the inside. I designed and cut some masks for the front windows from vinyl film and applied them to the upper front doors I’d glued in from the cut up CD case. I could then assemble the fuselage halves before inserting the finished interior.

With some refinement to the front windows, everything fitted together pretty well for a dry fit.
The front clear panes were blended it with thick layers of black CA mixed with VMS filler powder. The same was later applied to all the edges of the cabin doors.
After sanding, the front doors and cabin doors are all seamlessly blended into the main fuselage halves.

The completed main cabin was test-fitted between the mostly complete halves. Note the cut vinyl masks for the front door windows.

The general rule in this kit was that nothing fitted – the front windscreen being a significant (and welcome) exception. The main cabin doors were slightly short-shot around the lower sides resulting in huge gaps, so after glueing them to the fuselage sides, copious amounts of black CA mixed with VMS filled powder were daubed around the edges. After sanding everything smooth, the shut lines for all four doors were scribed in using a Madworks DLC 0.15mm scriber and some guide tape from the same company. This made everything look neater. I wasn’t shy about removing all the raised rivets as I planned to replace them all later on anyway.

As noted above, the fuselage is narrower than the tail, so thick plastic card was inserted along the length of the tail up to the engine housing.
Gobs and gobs of black CA were used as both adhesive and filler.

Once sanded down, the tail is a good fit all round...
…but sadly it’s wonky! The lower line of the fuselage shouldn’t have a kink in it.
Out with a razor saw to cut the tail off and start again.
This is the correct orientation.
And with it all filled and sanded down, it looks much better.

To get the tail and the rear fuselage width equal, Cobra Company recommend splicing the latter with plastic card. To begin with I wanted to avoid this as it might make the tail look kite-shaped in plan view. I considered thinning the resin tail, but that looked like a serious job, so I relented and spliced the tail with thick plastic card. To ensure the sides had the correct geometry, I inserted the card all the way back to the engine housing both top and bottom. Once set in with black CA, it cured quickly and was easy to sand smooth.

I then stuck on the tail with my customary lackadaisical attitude, sanded the seams down, was very proud of myself, and then realised it was wonky. I tried to convince myself to live with it, but couldn’t, and so did some negative modelling to cut the tail off, reattach it at the correct angle, fill the gaps and sand them smooth. Much better. The tail itself had quite a few moulding defects, and rather than try and preserve the fine raised detail, I sanded the whole unit smooth and left the rivets until later.

The particle filter just aft of the rotor mount is also a poor fit. That gap at the rear needs to go!
Again, wodges of plastic card and black CA closed the gap.
I also decided the fuselage lip where the exhaust sits was not sufficiently circular, so I cut a suitably sized ring of plastic from a part from the spares box.
Here the gap between the particle filter has been dealt with and that plastic circle is being faired in place around the exhaust.
It was only at this point I realised the exhaust was completely wrong anyway, and I added a spare exhaust from a Kitty Hawk UH-1D kit.
Unsurprisingly, fit issues were found elsewhere. This is the native fit of the roof to the main body. I also filled the area under the intake with plastic card (which has been primed in grey).

The particle filter (behind the rotor housing), cabin roof, nose and front lower quarter windows fitted where they touched and required copious quantities of filler and elbow grease to sand everything smooth. The leading edges of my new front doors also had to be shaped to meet the windscreen, and I couldn’t get the geometry quite right, so the side framing of said windscreen is rather too wide on the finished model. All of these (including all the clear parts) were sanded smooth starting at 400 grit Infini sanding sponges and, in the case of all the windows, working my way up to 4000 grit followed by the Tamiya polishing compounds. This cost me the windscreen wipers, but since they were moulded as just floating on the glass, replacing them with some PE later on was no bad thing.

There is a large hole in the rear of the cabin roof, just behind the intake and ahead of the rotor mast. This looks down into an open rear cabin, which I did not like, and so plastic card and more filler solved that problem. However, what this was indicative of was that plugging all the various holes into the main cabin was very difficult. After masking my beautifully clear parts, I did fear that debris and overspray would spoil the party later. I shall return to this later…

Finally everything is together, although I left the skids loose and used them as a stand until the very end.
The weapons cradle isn’t very nice and fits loosely into some holes on the underside. I made smaller slots using some plastic card.
More filler needed around the nose. The lower quarter windows have already been faired in with clear CA.
The skids are a very clunky moulding. I added the steps at the front from thin plastic card.
Surprisingly, the windscreen fitted very nicely, although obviously my scratchbuilt upper front doors weren’t a great fit.
I worked around all the joints eliminating the seams and most of the surface detail.

Never be afraid of sanding clear parts!

With some fine Infini sanding grits followed by Tamiya polishing compounds, clarity can easily be restored. Note that the windscreen wipers have been removed.
The features resembling towel rails on the roof and tail were replaced with bent plastic rod and punched discs. All rivets on the roof have been removed.

The elevators had no meaningful locating devices, so I added some brass tube which ran through the tail to lock them together. These would be added permanently at the very end.
Most Huey gunships had bracing struts added from the weapons pylon to the fuselage. These are not in the kit, so I made a crude representation with brass rod.
The resin tail was full of moulding defects that needed dealing with, and whilst I was at it, I removed all the raised surface detail.

I was now about ready to spray the thing, but lots of other jobs had been attended to parallel to construction. The main rotor blade needed a lot of cleaning up, and the tail rotor was extremely basic. I added a little spurious detail to the latter and extended the attachment spindle with some brass tube. The skids fitted loosely into enormous slots (more leaks into the cabin which I attempted to plug) and had big chunks of moulded plastic at their front tips, when in reality these should be delicately shaped steps with some fine bracing. Thin plastic card was used for these. The resin elevators had no attachment lugs that matched the kit, so brass tubing provided something sturdier and the ability to add them right at the end. Bent plastic rod and punched plastic card discs replaced the towel-rail shaped items on the roof and either side of the tail.

No miniguns are in the kit. Cobra Company provide resin versions, but these pale in comparison to the metal ones from Mini World. Note the cylindrical weapons mount (top).
These mounts should have a flat surface on the forward face. I added some parts from the spares box and blended them in with plastic rod and CA.

These M134 miniguns are amazing. The mounts I’ve fashioned are fictional.
Whilst unshrouded seven shot pods were more common, I wanted to add shrouded 19 shot pods. These are from Cobra Company and needed a fair amount of clean up. Sway braces are from the spares box.
The finished gun mounts primed in brown.

And then there were the weapons. A gunship needs guns, and the UH-1C flew with a few different standard configurations. The kit provides a quad machine gun set up, which was common on early airframes, but later replaced by either a whopping great big grenade launcher on the nose (provided in the kit) or M134 miniguns on sponsons outboard of the ubiquitous rocket pods. Monogram don’t provide the miniguns, but do provide 7-shot shrouded rocket pods. Unshrouded pods would have been preferrable, but Cobra Company moulded some adequate 19-shot pods that looked cooler. I didn’t want the big thing on the nose, so plumped for the miniguns and rockets.

These all attach to a cradle that threads its way between the skids under the fuselage. The pylons on the ends of this cradle bear very little relation to reality, but that was a correction too far for me. To the cradle are attached a pylon with the rocket pods, and then to this a cylindrical protrusion, the end of which features the gun. The cylinders should have a different shape to those in the kit, with a flat face to the front, which I crudely replicated with some spare plastic blended in with lots of filler and some plastic rod. Most gunship Hueys featured bracing struts between the pylons and the rear fuselage, which are missing from the kit, and I made some basic items up from brass tube.

Some resin miniguns come in the correction set, and these are okay, but a little blurry and have no useable ammo belts. I discovered that the Ukrainian company Mini World makes some gorgeous metal guns, with beautiful ammo belts, and couldn’t resist getting a couple. They are generic, so not intended for this application, but the casting quality is incredible, and I mocked up some fictious mounts for them to attach to the end of the ‘cylinders’.

Once the model was primed I could replace all the rivets with Eduard and Archer resin rivets on decal strip.

Before I could get to paint proper, I needed to rivet the model using Eduard and Archer resin rivets. These come on a sheet of decal film you cut into strips and are easy enough to apply over some Mr Finishing Surfacer 1500 Gray. The main downside is the decal film remains visible close up, and the strips don’t conform to compound curves, such as the nose, but it’s better than having nothing. Given the amount of bodywork I’d had to do, the kit-moulded rivets never stood a chance.

Monogram’s tail rotor hub is very crude. A spare part from the Kitty Hawk kit made it slightly better.
I primed the entire model in Mr Mahogany Surfacer 1000.

A test fit after airbrushing was completed. This was prior to any weathering.

The model shifted into paint, which I based on a solid coat of Mr Mahogany Surfacer 1000 followed by a highlight with Zinc Chromate Yellow. The actual colours I used are a bit of a blur as I opened three Olive Drabs I have by Mr Color (12, 38 and 304). 304 (FS34087) is the correct colour, but looked too saturated to me, so I mixed it with the other two and various brown and buff paints to get a lot of variety. These were all airbrushed fairly haphazardly over the airframe and the upper surfaces of the rotor blades.

Decals for UH-1Cs are hard to come by, and the only set I found available was by Print Scale. I’ve always been a bit nervous of this company because people seem to have trouble with their decals, and they do provide some specific instructions which don’t inspire confidence. Nevertheless, it was the only option I had, so I bought the set, featuring a UH-1C from the 114th Assault Helicopter Company in 1968.

I could find almost no photos of UH-1Cs from this company, only a couple of small images from not-very-helpful angles on the internet. The striking nose art made me guess this airframe didn’t have the nose-mounted grenade launcher, but everything else was up for grabs. Consequently, in the absence of photographic guidance, I decided to squeeze as many Huey oddities as I could into the final colour scheme. These included white recognition bands on the upper rotor blades, mis-matched tail rotor blades, chrome parts on the miniguns, graffiti on one of the rocket pods and some off-white edging around one of the lower windows, all of which I had seen on various photos. It was implausible that this is correct for this airframe, but it was fun.

Two methods of graffiti: freehand airbrush (right) and masked (left). It’s easy to see which is better!
My first experience with Print-Scale decals was very positive. The decals are extremely thin.
Decalling finished and all glossed up waiting for matt coats and oils.

The decals themselves were wonderful. Following the manufacturer’s advice, I left them to soak in warm (not hot) water for quite a long time. They need to be transferred directly from the paper to the model as they have no elastic strength at all and are extremely floppy. This means they conform very quickly and very well, but require a lot of care to move them around. I was impressed. Under some heavy coats of thinned Gunze GX113 Flat, the carrier film became almost invisible.

Operational Hueys in Vietnam were, of course, filthy, and so I played around with lots of ABT502 oil paints applied wet, mainly based around Sepia, but mixed variously with Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Black, Dust and Faded Yellow. Mixing black and yellow will get you olive drab, so with these colours lots of shades are possible.

My worst fears were exceeded once this was concluded and the masks were all removed from the clear parts: dust, debris and some weird overspray on all their interior surfaces. With absolutely no way to access the interior, I was crushed and lost enthusiasm for the remaining stages of the build. I played around with some dust effects on the skids (Lifecolor paint worn away with white spirits) and polished the top surfaces back to reveal the iron shade I had applied prior to the olive drab, but I couldn’t be bothered to extend it to the fuselage, which is why that’s inexplicably not dusty. The nav lights were all painted and the red light added to the engine housing from a scrap of clear plastic, along with all the silver door handles cut from stuff I found in the spares box.

This was a pig of a kit and I loved every minute of trying to make it better. The marred interior surfaces of the clear parts are a huge disappointment, but if I overlook that, the rest of it exceeded my expectations. Sometimes I just need a project where I’ve got nothing to lose to try new things and extend my comfort zone.

Year bought: 2005 (R&D Models, Cambridge)

Year built: 2025 (New Addington, Croydon)

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