The starting point was a painted fuselage with a resin nose attached, though it was pretty ill fitting. It left me with a fair amount to do.
I took out the windows as they were in a poor state. I cleaned them as best I could but it wasn’t really successful. Ideally, I should have taken the fuselage apart to mould and fit new windows, but the resin nose was too firmly attached and I did not want to break the long tail. There was no front window so I carved one from balsa wood and moulded one. The fit is far from perfect. I became fixated on the windows and all I can see when I look at the model are the poorly fitting badly marked windows.
I had most of the undercarriage legs and wheels, leaving me only to make two supports at the rear.
A fairly messy job was to scratch build the rotors and rotor head gear. I used scrap bits of plastic to make something roughly resembling this area. The rotor blades are a bit too thin but they will have to do.
I also made the tail rotor blades and attached them. What I did not notice at the time was that the supporting piece on the HAR10 is bigger than on the standard Whirlwind, so I had to retrospectively cut it off, make a new one and reattach the rotors. My patience by that stage had started to expire.
Painting proved to be the next big challenge. I should have gone for a camouflaged model, but instead I went for yellow. I’m normally fine with yellow, but for some reason I can’t pin down, it just did not work. At best, I can describe the result as showing a well worn dirty helicopter, with lumpy appearance.
I tried to outline the windows in black with a marker pen, but that did not work either.
I had no decals so I had to make and print them. I found some roundels from spares.
So there it is, a bit of a lemon all round, in more ways than one. Getting one thing wrong seldom spells disaster, but when almost everything does not work out, there is only one result. Anyway, if one does not push one’s limitations, one never gets any better so I’ll just pass it down to experience.
