Mi-24D

This is last year's project (yes, last year's - been a little busy with that pesky thing called, "real life"), and I'm just now getting around to posting it. It's a 1/72 scale Russian multipurpose Mi-24 helicopter, D variant. The kit is from Zvezda - nothing particularly special.

The kit was fairly basic, so I did a little scratchbuilding - just a few details around the cockpit and the door opening mechanism. I'm not too happy with the camouflage - I think the colors came out too similar - but it was a fairly simple kit, and I wanted to experiment with some techniques.

The camo pattern was masked off using Silly Putty, and I think the shapes came off right, even if the colors are a little off. I also wanted to experiment with bending the rotors the kit rotors were perfectly straight, and in real life the rotors droop. I achieved this by holding the rotors in front of a hair dryer and working them as they got soft. You have to be careful with this technique, however, as you can overdo it, and then it's hard to get the shape right (don't ask how I know...).

The cockpit itself was not too bad, the photo quality itself didn't come out too well - that's been another reason for not posting, our old camera doesn't take macro pictures well, but we're hoping to remedy that in the future. I added some decals from my old A-10 kit (I used a photoetch set with that one) to fill in some missing detail from the cockpit. Once again, the directions for painting given with the kit were pretty much useless - just another reminder to check reference photos before painting! :)

1/2500 Reliant

This is an old model I found mixed in with some miniatures stuff. It, along with another obscure Star Trek ship from the same era, was a gift from an old friend. That one's on the bench (the ship, not the friend). I haven't posted in a long while, but want to get back to it. In the meantime, here's a little taste of what I've been up to recently.

This Reliant was a bit of a mixed bag. It's a resin model, with a lot of good detail, but there were some defects which had to be filled in, mainly bubbles. Some of them were very small, and I missed them until the model was complete (maybe you can spot them...). In addition, there was some deformation of one of the warp nacelles, as well as the front of the saucer, and one of the shuttle bay doors is placed too high. The decals are good, but had some small discrepancies from the sources I found - overall, not bad for the scale.