but the pins seemed to be a little
out of alignment. So the best thing
to do is to remove the male pin
and self align with the assistance
of plastic card strips. Once these
where safely constructed the
canopy at the front of the aircraft
was attached. AMP does provide
some vinyl masks, which were not
too bad to be honest, the fit and
placement is simple, but removing
them at the end was difficult. One
interesting stage of the build which
was quite hard to get right was
the two windows directly above
the pilot, first there was no mask
provided here and also there was
no framing to indicate the location
instead AMP provide two very fine
etched parts which represented the
frame of the window and both are
extremely fragile. These neededto be carefully placed to make sure
they are symmetrical on both sides
while at the same time avoiding the
super glue damaging the clear areas
of the window, a very tricky stage!
The rear fuselage and tail
boom was made up of two halves
which required attaching together,
again the location pins were there,
but it was still a case to remove
these and use plastic card tabs to
assist alignment before attaching
the tail boom to the fuselage.
I now added the landing gearassembly excluding the wheel to the
aircraft, again there was the same
issue with locations not aligning
with the inserts on the external
parts of the aircraft, which seemed
to be becoming a theme of the kit.
It felt like AMP where trying their
best to turn a limited run kit into a
mainstream kit but unfortunately
this caused a few issues. Once
this stage was completed it
was time to get painting.PAINTING AND DECALING
First of all, I went around all the
joints cleaning up any flash left
over and filling gaps with perfect
plastic putty. I then used Tamiya
XF-19 sky grey as a primer and
gave the kit a full covering, as this
was also the interior colour and
would be visible through the clear
fuselage. Once dry I now applied
Tamiya XF-3 yellow on the small
warning area at on tail. This was
then masked and the whole aircraft
was sprayed with Tamiya XF-17
Sea Blue. Once dry I used my usual
Tamiya X-22 clear for my gloss coat
and then left it to dry for 24 hours.
During this time I worked on
the tail and rotor blade. The rotor
mast consists of a mix of plastic
and etched parts. Unusually for
a helicopter model the rotor and“THIS IS A LIMITED RUN KIT
AND AS A RESULT IT IS NOT THAT
STRAIGHTFORWARD A BUILD”
KIT REVIEWS
WWW.SAMPUBLICATIONS.COM • AUGUST 2018 • 59
056-63-Reviews-0818.indd 59 12/07/2018 11:50