lmagna

Thanks Denis I did their helmets a bright color as just like in real life some of us were able to get our helmets painted with something that was colorful and had some meaning to us personally. I think part of it was to just own something personal that was not OD in color! For some it was just a name or possibly small picture or something, others were full blown paint jobs. I went the latter because it adds some color to an otherwise somewhat drab model. There will be a ton of OD by the time this is all over. In an ideal world the pilot's helmet would have been a red white and blue American flag but that is beyond my skills and I would have just messed it up. I abandoned the idea of a Confederate battle flag on the co-pilot for much the same reason. In addition, even though common back in those days, now that flag is almost considered as controversial as the German Swastika, even though at the time it was a part of at least two state flags and I remember seeing it on at least two helmets during my tour. It is also kind of strange, but I could not really remember much about the details of anyone's helmet that I flew with regularly, so these helmets are kind of generic. I have a few other things done over the last few days but not really enough to post pictures about. I think I am almost done with the majority of the cabin and will be moving to the exterior and fuselage and much more rapid progress soon.

What you need to do Edward is build a box that the plane sits in and paint the insides to look like the lower hanger deck of an aircraft carrier with the plane sitting on the elevator. Then make the outside of the box look all flowery. Then you can sit the box in the house and every now and then open the lid and up pops the plane on the elevator. She gets her pretty and you get to see your nice build a little more often.

You need to remember that you and I have the same governor Egilman. He and the School Superintendent officially canceled school for the rest of this school year about nine hours ago and then spent the rest of a half hour answering stupid questions. Actually I suspected that this would happen when they first shut them down. Unlike some of the snow days they seem to take each year for virtually no reason, I pretty much agree with this one. The kids were not scheduled to return to school for another month anyway and all that would be left would be for them to turn in their school gear and go home for the summer. Why bother? You wouldn't expect the dedicated teachers to work later into the summer to make up for lost days/time would you?

I like looking at model buildings also. I even built, well partly built as I didn't finish it, a three foot tall Victorian dollhouse for my wife in 1/12th scale. Takes up a pretty large space on a special table where she can look at it regularly.

Well at least we will have company. Looks like the kids will be here with us. The Governor has officially declared the school system as closed for the remainder of the school year. They will still offer online classes until June but if what I have seen over the last couple of weeks is any indication, the teachers are getting away scott free. They are still on full pay while sitting at home just like the rest of us useless people. Maybe if we just took out their portion from the property taxes I need to pay. That would save me about $4000 this year!

Sorry CapnMac But the Dauntless didn't have folding wings.

Very nice looking job Kevin. I am not certain about where you are in England, but here in Washington USA. our average tide is around 12'. Sometimes it can get considerably larger. At any rate, around here the barnacles and mussels would go much further down the middle of the tide line and there would be staining between the middle section and the high tide mark. Kind of like a stratification of growth if that makes any sense to you. https://www.hakaimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/snorkling-embed-for-web.mp4

Looking good Jack. Dumb question. Why is the main rotor not going to turn? Was the kit designed that way?

My mental health was shot years ago. Way back in a time long ago I was required to take a mental exam for the work I was entering into. As I was hired there is a fairly good chance that I may have passed it, but then they could have just been desperate. But at any rate I have told people ever since that I am crazy and have papers to prove it.

Hope you are able to work out the canopy problem Edward. Is the canopy or the masking? Ether way I hope it comes together for you, I would hate to think you had lost any remaining hair or damaged your scalp. Sometimes it is better to stick to the bad words, (unless the wife is around). Another method is to go out to the back yard and yell, then the neighbors will wonder what is up. Which reminds me:

With or without the engine it would be quite the night. They offer a similar event on board the USS New Jersey battleship. Over nighters for kids and their parents.

How do you determine the scale of an iceberg? Wouldn't it be just as easy working from a set of plans?

Nice work Lou and quite a bit of progress for such a short time. How did you do the floor space in front of the pilot?

As everyone has said already, things are looking right on Craig. Are you going to go for showroom fresh?

Thanks Ken, Mark, and Edward. Hopefully the rest of the cut and paste stuff will look just as good, but I have a couple of other slow projects to add before I can close this part of the helicopter up and move on to faster paced sections of the build. I know the look of the pilot just holding the handle of the cyclic looks strange but there is a hole on the bottom to insert the control stick. It is pretty nice really as it allows the pilots hand to be completely around the grip. What is strange is that they didn't do the same with his right hand and I will have to match it up with the shaft of the collective when the time comes. I am holding off on the cyclic, collective and foot pedals until the last so that they don't get broken in all of the handling

Unfortunately I can take no credit for the seat belts other than to cut them out and glue them in and the choice of making them laying about in a random pattern rather than the neat crossed layout that the instructions show. They are PE provided in the kit. Thanks for the complement though.

Thanks Edward Some of our kids are also grown up, although not really gone. Two of them live within walking distance of our house. It oldest one who just turned 50 lives about 800 miles away. In reality the two we have at home now are actually grandchildren we adopted years ago and while they still call us grandma and grandpa we still consider them just two more sons just like the others. After 50 years of continuous children I doubt we would know what to do if it was just the two of us. Probably end up shooting each other. Well you were all warned. Here come the pictures! Like I said I had hoped to get more done than I have but at least there is some progress. Part of the reason is the amount of detail work that is needed in the cockpit area on this model. Once all of this is done there is almost nothing else to this kit of any significance. So without further due here are the pictures: I have some chores to attend to again today, but I will try and get some more build time in and make a little more progress in this incredibly slow part of the build so I can continue to torture your sensibilities. Thanks for looking in.

It was much better today. He was still unable to get in by himself so I did it for him in just a few minutes and we were able to do his additional studies in a couple of hours splitting his time in half. Morning and afternoon. Still some catch up needed but things seem to be much smoother today. I was also able to get some work in on the Huey although not as much as I thought I would. Had to take an hour to go online and order groceries. Now we are having delivery issues and the soonest I could get an opening is Saturday at 8pm. I hope this system does not get too overloaded. They also canceled two of the meat items on the order saying that they were not available. If this method becomes too overloaded then we will just have to grab up the gloves and head to the store and do it ourselves. I took some pictures even though there is not all that much new to see, but it is late, (early) and I need to get up in time to take care of school tomorrow. So I will post them tomorrow when I get a window. Again fair warning!

Like the others I like seeing you back again Carl and being amazed by your work. It astounds me to see how detailed and finely finished this tiny cockpit is. To be honest I am a little jealous as well, your skills, like a number of others here, are way out of my league.

Thanks everyone' It is not really a big thing but it has added some constant workload to my day that has not been there prior to the shutdown. I think the part that makes me the most upset is that there are plenty of programs in the country that are already in place that teach children on line and have been used fore years by home schooled children to good effect but, are being ignored by at least by our local school system. By the time they cobble their makeshift system together the shutdown will be over and the children will be back in school but missing months of potential education. Meanwhile 2/3rds, (66%) of my tax bill each year goes to the schools! What made me blow up was the idea that we as parents are considered just somewhere to house the children outside of the school environment and that school issued pass words and such are considered the private domain of the school and the child assigned to them. Oh well, rant over and time to get on with life, just did morning inventory and time to try out the new shopping service and see it is performs twice in a row. Also late morning class duties, then it's building Huey's time. At least I think it is.

To be honest I have not done much on my Huey the last couple of weeks. Although I’m retired and it would seem that with this “Stay Home” order I would have nothing but time on my hands, it seems like nothing but extra work. First off, as both my wife and I would be considered as poster children for catching the virus I had to try and find ways around everyday simple needs. The biggest of these was finding a way to limit our exposure in the grocery store and still keeping the two of us and our live-in Velociraptors supplied. I had to learn to do this simple task on line and ended up going through three considerably different store systems before finding one that seems, (So far) to work. Then there are the two aforementioned Velociraptors. The schools sent them home two weeks ago and told us not to bring them back! So both the school system and myself have been going back and forth on how to get the kids to study and to get some kind of useful scholastic content while at home. You would think that this would be fairly easy as children all over the country have been home schooled for years with little or no issues. But the public school teachers are acting as if they just landed on an alien planet and are at a complete loss. There have been at last count by me, four different “Lession” systems introduced by teachers by each school my two boys attend. I have not had to do too much for my High School aged boy, he has some computer skills of his own and all I need to do is kick start him now and then to do the work instead of hiding out in his room pretending. But my twelve year old is another matter. While he has been pretty good at attending the class hours I have assigned to him, his teachers have been all over the map on where to locate the work he has been assigned and that seems to change daily. Plus he has been assigned school logins that are apparently top secret need to know only information and parents are NOT on the inside loop. They are sending me the information of what they expect him to do, but neither he nor I have enough information to get there. As an example, today I ended up emailing one of his teachers to tell her that he would not be able to do the assignment as after spending the morning trying to access the site he and I were no longer on speaking terms. She said that we were not the only people with location and login issues,(SURPRISE) and I agreed to a telephone call where SHE tried to walk him through the location and login procedure. I had the whole conversation on speaker phone and was also following the procedure on my computer, so I would know how to do it tomorrow when it would be needed again. When he reached the inevitable unbreachable hurdle I chimed in and asked for his school email and was told that I was a parent and had a different way of entering the site! Needless to say I pretty much went ballistic and handed her over completely to my son and told her good luck. She lasted about another half hour and said she would call back in an hour or two but would be emailing me with added instructions. My wife was also angry with me for losing it so I forwarded the emails to her and told her that she should deal with it then. I had been doing it for the last two weeks and was pretty tired of it. She made a feeble attempt at working with my son and the instructions for about fifteen minutes and then badgered me into taking the chore over again. At that point it was either leave the house and find someone that was contaminated and end it all, or go ahead and tackle it yet again. This time after combining tidbits from four separate emails from the teacher I was able to get him into the required site. I tried to explain to him how I did it but I have my doubts that much of it sunk in as he pretty much had that deer in the headlight look on his face. So along with trying to deal with all of the other things that this time of year brings me, this is pretty much how my life has been going and to be honest I have done almost no work on the Huey. Certainly nothing worth documenting. So tomorrow I have a couple of more financial matters to try and clear up and of course the obligatory school session, but I am making it a point to get over to the working space where the Huey has patiently been waiting and get some worthwhile work done. So fair warning to the forum members to look the other way, here comes more of the Huey.

That is some incredibly nice work OC Truly something to be proud of. Did you have something to use as a reference or did you just do it as you thought it should look?

Me too. That is quite the setback especially as your finish was looking so good.

I have used it a number of times on my Huey build and it has been almost perfect with no loss of surrounding detail.