lmagna

Wow!

I had a small patch with the normal helmet/boots that I had sewn onto a rain coat that a Papa-San on base made for us using an issue waterproof laundry bag. Almost everyone had them, He was doing a booming business. We had rank, shoulder patches and stuff sewn on them just like our uniforms but it was not an official uniform item. I still had it a few years ago but somehow it has disappeared along with so much other stuff.

That was my policy whenever I ate local. If it tasted good, (Almost anything did after a steady diet of mess hall food) and didn't kill me, I didn't want to know what it was. Like you I was pretty sure that at some point the food had been someones pet. But then It could have just as easily been rat! Some of them were HUGE!

That was what we called "Chicken Plates". Like you said, it was heavy, Hot, and awkward. We too switched over to the lighter armor. The only problem with all of the figures I have for this build is that they are all wearing Chicken Plate armor. There is no way I consider myself skilled enough to change that to a flack vest, so Chicken Plates it will be. I suppose that with the helmets it does serve to distinguish the crew from the troops a little. Some of the guys had some pretty creative helmet work. It was a pretty much do-it-yourself thing. The only regs we had was that it could not be offensive to the military. When our crew chief, (The left gunner) was getting short he painted a relatively small blue and red chevron on the back of his helmet and instead of white letters saying "RE-UP", he wrote "FED-UP." It lasted a few weeks and then it was seen by the wrong person and he was told he had to take it off. My helmet was kind of simple. When I first reported for door gun duty I told the AC my name and kind of where I was from. He said that there was no way he was going to try and pronounce "Magnabosco," especially over the radio. I thought that like many other times I was going to become Magna or Bosco again whether I liked it or not. As the town in California, Capitola, was almost unknown further than five miles away I had gotten in the habit of saying I was from "a town close to San Francisco." So the AC took the fact that I was "a traveling gun for hire" and from San Francisco and I became "Paladin." As "Have Gun, Will Travel" was one of my childhood favorites I was glad for the name and ended up painting my visor cover black and had a small white chess knight on the right side. I kept the rest of the helmet OD but I did get some gloss OD that was also a little darker and painted that too. I plan to try and duplicate the helmet on the right gunner. Later I also painted a little flight helmet with combat boots under the bottom and "SHORT" under that on the back, but there is no way I could carry it off at this scale. At one point someone suggested it would be cool to put a white chess knight on my black 45 auto holster that I wore almost daily. But I couldn't figure out a way to do it and not have it fall off, and thought it was possibly over the top anyway.

I believe there were at least a couple of models. The Cobra pilots wore a helmet that had two pull down visors. One smoked like ours and the other clear for nighttime use. I liked theirs better but never found a way to get my hands on one. I was not authorized. There were at least two model shapes one with the lumpy ear pieces and the other with a more smooth rounded shape. Mine was a Gentex SPH-4, (I remember because my rank was SP-4. So what else would a SP-4 wear but a SPH-4, H for Helmet?) At any rate looking out from the inside was like looking out from a very dark set of sunglasses, kind of a smokey green. But looking at another person wearing a helmet with the visor down they looked black. You could not see through to their face even at close quarters. The gloss was because they were highly polished. In some circumstances like lower light, cloudy or overcast days we would leave the visor up and just wear our issue sunglasses.

Thanks Mike \\\\\\I don't really need all of the details i suppose but I have never seen a model aircraft quite like it., Looks like a total brute!

I'm a little concerned about coating the batteries in silicone. Are they vented batteries? If so then you could run into a situation, especially when charging them where they could try and vent and end up blowing up instead. I have seen it happen in a RC sub. It was being charged by the owner while we were loading other stuff in the car for a day at the lake. Luckily when we were pretty far from where the sub was sitting it blew up! Just one cell went, but it still blew a hole in the hull large enough to stick the handle of a large screwdriver through! Was there another class of combat models that use 1/96 scale Ron, or am I just thinking wrong again? As an after thought, now that I think of it a 1/96th scale battleship would be huge. I stand corrected 1/144 it is.😫

Now we just need to see if they survive my efforts at adding color to them!

Awesome looking work. Do you have a few close up pictures of the engine?

I thought he was supposed to be a lover not a fighter?

Thanks Craig, they were quite the find. I almost didn't buy them as they came from somewhere in the back side of France from a company I had never bought from before. I also bought some after market gunners that look promising from another company but have been afraid to look at them closely. One struggle at a time. I am glad I went the extra effort as to me this trip back is the people. The Huey, while important is after all just the vehicle that gave us the ability to do the job, and more importantly got us back. They are 3D printed and like you say are SUPER detailed. I like them because their visors are down so I am hoping that it will make their faces easier to paint in a realistic manner. (Another thing I have never done before that this build is full of, people) Their short coming, at lest for the pilot is that his hands are formed in a closed position and it may make it hard to place the collective in his left hand. The cyclic handle is already in his right hand and will need to alter the cyclic column to fit. Just more tiny nit fiddle stuff that is getting to be common on this build. Nothing has been a install and move on to the next part. EVERYTHING has been a custom alteration/fit. DOH! What a duffus! I have a ton of gray sprue. For that matter I have the legs of the original jump seats that I can use to fill the holes! I have of course read about doing it that way for years but I have never had to deal with this much modification before and therefore the idea has never been used by me personally! Thanks for kicking my soft skull and jolting my even softer brain, or whatever is in there! Whatever is visibly left will just look like the cargo tie down rings that were there anyway!

Here we go on another weird food train! Cow tongue is pretty common here in the PNW and as far as I know I have seen it on meat shelves all of my life. Also heart is readily available in the common market. I have eaten heart and found it pleasant but very lean with almost no fat, so hard to cook without making it tough. Tongue on the other hand is supposed to have a lot of fat but because of the look many people just cut it up into small pieces because of the look. I like Liver as well if it is not over cooked.

Don't drink pop very often. Don't snore at all, as SHE would kill me if I did, (She sometimes snores though, ) Can't sleep more than an hour or two at a time anyway without waking up and shifting from one side to the other. BUT I HAVE slept in Hammocks more than once. You have to do some special things to stay warm while camping but some of my best nights sleeping have been while hiking/camping and sleeping in a hammock! Those crewmen had it pretty good in the old days when they slept in hammocks and the officers were stuck in bunks!

Well, as i said earlier, I think I have made a little progress since I last posted an update. Not finished like Mark but certainly further along than I was. In my last update I was still having formal combat with the pilot seats and assorted small and ill fitting/designed photo etch parts. I finally pretty much got all that worked out and ended up with seats that seem to cover the look properly. At least for how I will display this model. I then had to build and install the center jump seat that had to be set up to allow proper seating of the pilots. So I had to make a side trip and set up the pilots in their seats. This of course made me have to cut and file pilot butts to fit in said seats. They probably would have fit in the stock kit seats but of course I had to use the after market seats with the kit floor in my build. So far the pilot has gone through a buttectomy and is sitting pretty much where he should. I may have to so some more for a more custom fit. At some point I was careless and broke off his helmet mike and will have to replace it at some point. Hopefully I don't do the same with the co-pilot when he gets his buttectomy. At any rate it was becoming clear that possibly I have been wasting my time these last couple of weeks making the seats from all those tiny PE parts and re-learning all those cuss words from my shaded past. Everything is becoming so crowded that you can't see much of it at all! By the time I add the cabin overhead and roof none of it will be visible at all! Everything you see in the pictures is just sitting there, not glued into the cockpit. The only thing actually "In place" is the middle jump seat. I had to drill new locating holes in the deck to obtain the proper location. Then I got it wrong as there was not enough room for the pilots and seats forward and I had to re-drill holes about one and a half mm further aft. I rechecked the fit and clearances and took the following pictures: This was the first location. It cramped the cockpit too much so I knew I would have to move it. The holes in the deck are the kit holes that would have been used if I had used the kit seats, which by the way are total garbage in every way. The next view is from the front, showing how little can be seen even before the pilots are seated. After you seat the pilots virtually everything I have done over the last couple of weeks has disappeared! the co-pilot on the right still needs to be altered to get him to fit the seat properly. So all in all I am happy to have made some progress at last and that even though the deck is beginning to look a little like Swiss Cheese from all the unused kit holes, and mis-drilled location holes I am also happy with the results. The holes can and will be filled in and the "Look" looks like I remember it. There are of course a few exceptions but they are small and I can live with them I think. I am also getting a bettter idea of what will be possible to see and what won't and will probably stress out a little less about those kinds of things in the future. At least I will try. Next is the altering, locating, and assembly of the remaining jump seats and their painting, along with filling and repainting the poor abused deck. Thanks everyone for looking in and helping.

Those are gas powered BB guns built into the ship and the ships are at a standard scale or 1/96th scale. The sides are built of balsa sheeting and this is what allows them to be sunk by the relatively low powered BB guns. There is another class of combat ships that have guns more scaled to caliber of the real vessel. They can fire bearings up to 1/4" and can have a number of operational turrets and guns bases on some formula related to the real ship. These ships can take up quite a bit of lake and the outcome can be obviously pretty brutal. Obviously they can run a fair amount of money as well.

No chair for me. I can't sit in them for more than an hour or two anymore, but I will be in and out.

Who would want to? I don't even classify that as survival food!

Same here, along with some rattle can stuff. In addition it has been something like twenty or thirty + years since my last model outside of a very few 1/24th Sports Prototype racing cars and a 1/24th copy of my real R-50 Mini Cooper.

It is my hope to airbrush it. My time spent in the cockpit has been extensive and I have not even started painting the fuselage yet. I was LOOKING at it today though, and I think I have come upon a method of spraying that will be unique to the Huey. I do want to get in a little more practice on the small interior stuff and see if I can whip my tip clogging issues with paint drying in the tip of the airbrush. I have discovered one thing about airbrushing Acrylics though. If you mess it up, (As I almost always do so far) just spray it down with Windex and wash it off with water and start all over again! Great feature for a bum dumble like me.

Back in my RC days we often ran on a local pond that had ducks and geese during the spring and summer. Of course they got chased now and then as a matter of course. Mostly by the guys with the bigger boats. One day a guy with a HUGE Mr. Darby: went after a mated pair of geese, not realizing, or not caring that they had a new clutch of goslings. Instead of swimming away as would be normal they attacked in force, using their feet, wings and bills. He was barely able to escape without being sunk! He had a broken mast, the crane was almost overboard, hanging by it's wires, and several railings were missing all together! They had really done a job on him! Needless to say those geese were given a wide berth from that day on. We always referred to it as "The Battle Of Goose Island".

We actually had one upstairs for years. It was some kind of display doll that had fallen on hard times and had a cracked face. If you plugged it in the head would move back and forth and the arm in some direction. My wife was going to repair the face and sew cloths for it but of course never did. At some point my middle son put an old child's hoody on it and a plastic Halloween knife knife in the hand of the moving arm. With the wig that was all askew already and the cracked face, she looked pretty fearsome even to me. I don't think so. If you did I put them in a place where they could be found when needed. Meaning I don't know where! I wish I did. They look like they would have a smaller tip than the pencil types I stole from Laurie. The one I stole has been working pretty well except it also seems to be missing on the table every time I need it. Luckily I am done with PE for a little while At least as far as I'm concerned. I should get a few progress pictures tonight after diner and post them. There has actually been a few things done believe it or not.

Might I ask WHY?

If the cooks we had in the military got a hold of it it would not have been. I think they could have wrecked the taste of water! Believe it or not I can remember breaking open a box of "C" rations for a meal rather than go to the mess hall to eat what they were offering!

I don't know if it applies to all Eduard kits but the one I have is just a rebox of another kit under their name with added PE. The model I have is the 1/72 JRS-1 flying boat and was originally made by Sword. I don't know if it is made by anyone anymore.

WHEW......... For a minute I thought you were talking about me and I was going to have to deny being tapered! Great progress J