Building Wessex XS 880 from the Italeri kit
The blue styrene wasn´t the easiest to work with, but things fit remarkably well. I started on the interior and the nose which needed some detailing.
I replaced the two-aprt kit exhausts with hoemmade ones from brass tubing and PE handwheels with the wheelish part cut out.
I made a cutout in the nose and added a PE grille to make this area look better, and especially achieve the typical see-through aspect.
To make what you see through the see-through area more believable, I made a curved part cast in dental resin for the front and an insert from foam board for the rear part of the interior.
I had to spray the nose prior to installing the interior and prior to adding it to the fuselage. I primed it in black, and continued with grey, red, orange and finally dayglo orange.
The Eduard masks worked exceedingly well and showed me I needed to cut another window into the access door not provided in the kit (even though the transparency was).
This kit needed some masking and some preshading.
The rotor blades were masked and sprayed per instructions. As the CTA decals did not include the rotor blade stripes, I used the ones from the kit. As they came from the late 90ies, that wasn´t that satisfying. I still remember Revell decals from that era, an overpowering tendency to silvering was their main characteristic.
Decaling the aircraft, that hi-vis scheme looks quite attractive to me.
Finally. After decaling, I sealed the decals with Future, added a flat coat and then the numerous fiddly bits. The antenna wires were made from Albion Alloys .1 mm nickel silver wire.
Commentaires
17 29 January 2023, 13:26
Piotr Sarniński-GóreckiFrank ! Beautiful Wessex ! Is the Arks' airing complete ?
29 January 2023, 14:37
Frank SpahrThank you, Piotr! Almost. I just brought out the Sea King kit and tested tinting the windows green. So I think I´ll start it pretty soonish.
29 January 2023, 16:22
Album info
I´m building a collection of the aircraft from HMS Ark Royal IV´s late airgroups, as seen in the TV documentary "Sailor". This helicopter, a true workhorse, was built from the Italeri kit (albeit in a Revell boxing) using CTA decals and Eduard masks and PE. It needed some backdating and I hope I got most of it right.
