SH-60B 1/35 Seahawk by Kitty Hawk

Very nice work.

Thank you!

More fuselage work...
Before I forget, let me make a proclamation. DO NOT PUT ON ALL THE LITTLE ANTENNA AND OTHER THINGYS THAT STICK OUT FROM THE FUSELAGE (technical term) WHEN THEY TELL YOU TO IN THE INSTRUCTIONS. PUT THEM ON AS CLOSE TO PAINTING AS POSSIBLE. Otherwise you will break them! And repairing them is neither fun nor optimal. I'm really annoyed that I didn't follow this advice and have been repairing things that stick out continously as I handle the model to do other important things.

I built and installed the mount for (I am assuming) is the MAD Bird (Magnetic Anomaly Detector) rack. This one had a signal line in styrene and a sway brace that flush mounts to the fusselage.

I'm preparing the model for painting. That requires mixing up the instructions. In my case it meant putting on the hydraulics fairing that wasn't called out unti near the very end. It will also include the bottom radome that goes on tomorrow.

The fairing fit poorly, again due to that fuselage gap. As I mentioned yesterday, this gap keeps rearing its ugly head forcing parts to no longer fit by the amount of the gaps dimension. I don't know what I'm going to do with this mess. I may build out and smooth the flank to erase this discrepency. Might as well since I've been doing it all along.

In my handling I doinked the rear antenna mast. These protrusions are the reason I made the proclamation at the start of this post. I didn't even know that I broke it until I found it as you see it here.

I was just thick enough that I could actually drill and pin it. Not a pefect solution! Further smooting will help a bit.


To prevent more of this, I chose to fabricate the remaining two of this array out of metal. They are standoffs for a wire antenna that I'm going to assume is a low frequency communications link, but Gino will correct me.

I formed the phos-bronze and cut some PE fret for the bases. I will further finish them by bulking out the airfoil shape of the mast with some CA or Bondic. I solder these embedded into a ceramic soldering pad that is fantastic for soldering small assemblies. I will do this again when I fabricate the metal tripod that's going to support the rear-view mirrors. I'm going to replace the styrene struts without giving it a second thought.

Here are the two supports ready for further finishing.

The rear EMS pods went on port and strbd without problem.

I also forgot to color the floor of the engine compartment so protected the engine and airbrushed some dark iron into the space. I also did this on the inside of the engine cover which will be displayed open. I first shot this with the Tamiay silver laquer. Paint was scrtched off when I was fitting it.


For initial engine protection during painting, I covered it with some wet Bounty towel.

And then stuck the engine cover on as best I could.

We're getting close to painting time. I have to install the main landing gear and then work on the tail boom including the ResKit swing joint and tail rotor, so there will be some resin building fun. I have to decide whether to paint the exhaust ducting before and masking it and the shoot the gray, or after and and mask the gray. Any thoughts? I'm also thinking about how to actually hinge the copilot's door.

That is amazing work. The best part of all that detail is I'm not doing it.

"Thou shalt not glueth the fiddly bits 'ere it be absolutely necessary". Commandment #1.

Good work so far!

Really impressive work, I will follow with a lot of interest!

Thank you!

Hope everyone had a decent and safe New Years. We stayed put and had a nice FaceTime with our friends back East. We're all getting older and several folks from our group were having health issues.

Put the metallic antenna loops onto the Fuze after making a 3rd one. I was trying to add some bulk with various kinds of media including epoxy putty and Bondic. Putty didn't stick. Bondic did sort of. When attempting to shape it with the Dremel I thinned the phos-bronze too much and it bent in half. Ergo, making another.

I put them onto the fuze with gel CA with a bit of medium CA to smooth the edges a bit. These should be more rugged than the frail styrene ones I was replacing.



The movable part of the tail boom gets glued together now, but before you do you have to captivate a actuating cylinder in two slots on either side. I didn't like the depth of the plastic lugs so I added some 1/32" phos-bronze.



I got started on the ResKit tail boom hinge replacment. It's a pretty complex little project including faux pulleys with wire simulating the cables that control the tail pitch. You have to remove material on both the fixed and movable parts to create proper space for the more detailed resin parts. And here are the results. I used a combination of #11 blade, micro-razor saw and an Xacto #11-sized saw to remove the plastic.



The hinge area had to be surgically removed to give space for the more detailed hinges on the resin parts.

Here's the fixed boom with it surgery completed.



Lastly, here's the first resin part that I'm preparing. You have to open up some slots in the part as well as cut it out of the sprue block. The resin is tough, but not that tough and you can screw it up pretty good if you're not careful. You can see the highly detailed hinge parts that will fit into the newly cut holes.

Spent most of a long work session fixing a mess! You see I misread the instructions on "what to remove" on the tail booms. The plans showed the colored area and I read that as it needed to be removed... which I did yesterday. When I trimmed out the resin hinge bulkheads and fit them, this is what I saw.



That humongus gap was the material I erroneously cut away. You weren't supposed to "remove" that colored area, you were supposed to "thin" it by .3mm from the inside. I neglected to see the decimel point and my ADD brain jumped to the wrong conclusion. The resin pieces were still supposed to sit between the fuselage styrene. They were just a little thicker, so the styrene needed to be re-shaped.

This meant I had to add back the missing material and dress it so it wouldn't be noticeable to the novice viewer. Show judges would probably pick it up. I used some styrene strip held with both solvent cement and CA. I replaced rivet holes in the new parts.



I then shaved the new material on the movable boom so the piece would sit between the packing. On the fixed portion I have the hinge butting up against the fuselage.



With the both sides fit to their remade ends I was able to actually start building the hinge assembly. As usual ResKit is asking you to assemble and fabricate stuff that just about at the edge of my skill set. Lots of butt joints held by CA. The pulleys are almost microscopic and they expect you to thread some .2mm wire around them to simulate control cabling. I'm thinking about it, but may not do it. I actually hinged the parts with 0.022" wire and they work, but...and it's a big but... the next parts you add prevent the hinge from working.



I glued the part to the movable boom and that's where I had to stop. The folded boom would block painting of the fuselage and the closed side of the boom. I will have to glue it all in after the painting.



There were more gaps that need filling. I used a combination of a thin styrene and Bondic. I traced the shape of the open onto a piece of paper and cut the piece. It need more adjusting and then further filling.



Here is the gap filled.



Last thing up today was the tail strike bumper. This little assembly was one of those royal pains in the butt. If you've had the fun of watching "Rocco Sciavoni" on PBS streaming, you'd know that this was probably a "9th level pain in the ass." He ranks them with the 10th level being a murder. This little job took 15 minutes or more.

You have to captivate the movable strut in the two holes and then glue it together. The triangualar shape made gripping difficult and the part kept rotating and coming out of the holes. I tried all sorts of things including taping one half to the bench so it wouldn't be moving around. I finally got to a big sigh.



Once I got it together, putting it on the plane was not a problem. It could have been engineered differently since the part is not actually movable in the final install. It could have been slipped into a slot and glued.



As much as I'm champing at the bit to get painting this job, all these bits and pieces must be installed properly. And, BTW: That pointy antenna sticking out of the bottom broke off AGAIN! As I said, IGNORE THE INSTRUCTIONS AND GLUE ALL THE TINY ANTENNAS ON AT THE LAST POSSIBLE MOMENT BEFORE PAINTING. Otherwise, you be re-gluing them, and fixing them for the rest of the build. There are so many that it's hard to grab the beast to do any heavy lifting (like adding filler pieces at the tail to fix big mistakes).

Lovely work so far!

As you can see I screw up with regularity, but I also have great recovery skills and lots and lots of persistence. I had a short session and kept working on the tail boom and the main landing gear.

The tail boom has a small vertical stabilzer that went on nicely. Needed a little filing here and there to get a close fit.



I then needed to back up and build the main landing gear. The instructions on its assembly are a bit sparse. The main gear housing (minus the strut) consists of a 3-piece sandwich. I built the first one after figuring that the two pieces I removed from the sprue didn't quite make the whole assembly. Then I went to cut the parts for the other side and only found two of the three on the sprue. I didn't remember cutting off one of those pieces, and after a thorough search of the work bench area and parts racks, was unable to find it. It was quite desparate becasuse this was not an easy part to scratch-build. I did a complete search of the immediate floor around the workspace, but nada. Then I spotted a beige piece of plastic across the room under my 3D printing bench. And it was the missing piece! I don't know how this happened, but I was very happy that I didn't need to fabricate a new one. And with Kitty Hawk out of business, I don't know of any way to get a new part from them.



The strut is captured by fingers in the housing and, if the shock strut actually moved, could articulate. But... since the strut is solid the gear is fixed. I also glued the wheels together in preparation for painting. BTW: a large part of the filled underbody in the front will be covered by the large, round radome.

And we had our first snow of the season here in Da Ville. Winter has finally arrived.

I had neglected to post the above entry on Thursday, so I'm doing a two-for today. This is today's post.

One of my readers in another forum actually worked on the Seahawk and has been indispensable in pointing out specific details. He led me to the MilSpec publication with the correct color callouts. Thank you! It's really what keeps me writing about all this stuff.

I've been studying a lot of pictues and some look to be the medium gray throughout. Some of the images show the vast variations in weathering that can be applied from sparkling clean to worn in various spots especially the underbelly.

This one is pristine! And appears to be monochromatic.

Here's some underbelly soiling that could be added. It also shows the lighter bottom color and it looks like I'll have to add that. Good view of the missile detection sensor on the EMS at the front corner. And here I thought it was another search light... The cargo hook in the belly looks like it's painted light blue.

And another bird... Again, very clean... a little soiling on the tail boom. Also, panel lines are very tight and not very noticeable. Amazing extension on the tail wheel shock strut.

Here'sa close up showing just how clean these things can be. What is that red panel with the handle on it? Notice the Maverick missile loadout.

Another bottom shot. This one again shows the soiling esepcially in the low pressure area behind the radome. This one looks like the bottom is NOT painted in the lighter color.

Good work so far!

Thanks Gents. One of my readers on the other forums in which I post this build posted a great diagram of the Seahawk's paint scheme… 3-tone which I'm going to attempt to duplicate.

Today's post combines yesterday and today's work. Got the tail rotor built and wrestled the horizontal tail plane into submission.
The ResKit tail rotor has great detail, but in my case, the lifting rods (that control the pitch horn) just seemed way too short so I substituted them with 0.022" wire. Drilling the small rod ends was painstaking, but went ahead without difficulty.

Here are the four blades with the three parts attached: Blades, hubs and angled horns.

The arrow denotes on of the tiny counterbalance arms that broke off during cleaning. Another broke during assembly so two are not metal. Nothing attaches to these protrusions.
The four lift rods go between the spide and the horns. The arrow points to the kit part that just is way too short. I doubled checked what I was doing and couldn't find a mistake.


The instructions called out exchanging the kit supplied prop shaft with another that was significantly shorter. Unfortunately (for me) I had already fully assembled the tail boom and that required this part to already be installed.

The solution was simply to drill the resin hub deeper to accept the kit's pin.

Here's the rotor in place without glue.

Next was finishing the boom with the horizontal wing. I glued it up according to the instructions. The actual gluing points between the side pieces and the center were ridiculously small and fragile.

After it cured for about an hour I tried to snap it into place with the two small pins protruding from the center piece that engaged into two holes in the tail boom mount. It was quite flimsy, and when I put it into the folded position the wing was completely in the way. How the heck did this thing fold?

As I studied the tail plane I realized that those delicated attachment points were actually hinges. The darn thing folds! This was not called out at all in the instructions, nor did I study the folded tail intensely enough to pick this out. So broke the previous delicated joints and realized their surface area could not support the tail pieces in the upright folded position. Instead I faked it and made some phos-bronze wire supports. They're not scale nor prototypical, but they'll support the tail pieces in the display position. While the main rotor is folded hydraulically, all the tail boom folding appears to be manual.

That finished yesterday's work. Today I 'hinged' the opposite side and did some more work on the center section. I drilled it out 0.022" and then opened to 1/32" and used wire to make a much stronger assembly.

And here's the end result with the tail planes in their folded position (unglued) that will allow the boom to fold next to the fuselage as it should.

Now y'all are up to date.

Incredible details

Lovely work so far!