lmagna

OK............ You win for limited duty travel Jack. (I still think the duty as you explained it the other day was at the bottom of the list though) Now we also know what you were doing 50 years ago as well. Good job! I don't think my wife could tolerate me for that long. We are only at something like 38 years now and she is letting me know that I am treading on thin ice! Congratulations on your war prize. 100 feet + 480 kts sounds like you were doing the fast tour Ken. Look quick and don't look back! No wonder the F-4 that buzzed us that time was gone so fast! We were probably only going about our normal 50-70 kts! Truly the turtle and the hare!

Still looks good from where I'm sitting.

Well SOMEONE was getting around more than I was Jack. Basic Training in northern California, (At the base I was born at in fact), Advanced Infantry Training in BEAUTIFUL? Oklahoma! Then off to the ever glorious mud hole of SE Asia. One glamour station after the other. 30,000 feet would have been an improvement on some days.

That turned out quite nicely Jack. Why do you need a new mounting plank? The one you have looks nice to me! Congratulations

I have used it a number of times. In fact when you posted last year about trying to repair a broken glass if some kind that had a stem inside I gave you a link and recommended it as possibly the best repair method for that kind of repair. Be that as it may, I have used it a number of times over the last couple of years for several repairs. It is the ONLY glue that I have been able to find that will repair the plastic frames around the lenses of my kids glasses. Two sets of glasses over the years and two repairs that never failed. Three long stem wine glasses for my wife. Did not continue using them all that long as you could still see where the break had occurred, (Missing shard of glass) but while she was still using them there were no issues. Didn't put them in the dishwasher so I have no idea how they would have fared under those conditions. Fixed a coffee mug handle for a cup that is kind of like an old tennis shoe and I just like it. No problems in probably six months of almost daily use. GREAT stuff and even though I thought it was kind of expensive for such a small tube when I bought it I still have not run out of it after all this time and various repairs.

WOW that's a hard one to hit the "like" button on Denis. I hope it does not drag things down around your house too bad. I hope things get better quickly for you and Phyllis

All that makes you seem like a world traveler to a poor Huey crewman who on any given day probably flew 200 miles or less Ken. Wasn't there an advertisement back then that said "Join the Army and see the world"? Or was that the Navy?

I probably should be wearing them Alan. I do have problems with understanding what people are saying if they are not directly in front of me. I have lost a lot of high pitch sound ability from years or exposure to loud sounds of one type or another. I started wearing a headset to watch TV when we are watching family stuff in the evening this last year, that way I can listen at a level that works for me and I don't blast them out of the room. The rest of the time I watch very little if any TV so there is seldom an issue. Much of the video type stuff I do watch is in using my laptop. With a earbud it is much easier for me to see and hear than the TV across the room. I tend to look over the top of my glasses or just take them off if I'm watching regular TV. Movie theaters are the same way. I hope the hearing aids work for you. I have been told that they can be hard to get used to because they pick up everything so not only voices are louder but everything else as well.

No padding anywhere but the engine bulkhead and overhead. The floor as I remember it had a kind of no skid coating. Almost all of the models show diamond plate but I just can't remember seeing it used. (I am beginning to worry about my memory and wonder if I should have done this build 25 years ago instead of now.) We never took off the sound padding but if it got really hot and we needed the extra lift ability we would take the side doors off and leave them at the base.

Wow, you guys got to really get around, Thailand, Da Nang, Bien Hoa. We never got to go anywhere.

Thanks OC, will do.

Well it looks like at last like first blood has been drawn. I took all of the GMK pieces that will comprise the cockpit interior if I use those parts and cleaned the considerable amount of flash and casting excess from the edges and filed them down. After they were cleaned up they looked considerably better than they had right out of the box. I took all of the parts provided with the kit and did pretty much the same thing even though this only took a few minutes. I then compared the two sets to try and determine what I would be used in building the model. To be honest there are aspects of each set that I have issues with. First I will show you the parts and then try to explain the + and – of each and what I feel could be wrong. The cabin floor on the CMK has panel lines and tie downs that look right to me, but somehow I cannot get it out of my mind that it should have a textured surface like the kit floor. The panels on the kit floor do not look right at all. The CMK cockpit is divided into two floors, one for the pilot section and another for the rear cargo section. The kit floor is one piece. The kit floor has tracks for the side doors and the CMK version does not. The center console between the kit and the CMK version is a no contest event. The kit console looks like total junk and fiction! In the case of the engine bulkhead and covers it is again a no contest in favor of the CMK set. The padding on the CMK rendition looks like padding! If the diamonds were smaller on the kit bulkheads it would look like diamond plating and should be on the floor! The detail on the CMK version while not necessarily absolutely correct is much better than the kit supplied plain padded bulkhead. I do not know if there are additional parts in the kit that are meant to be attached to the kit bulkhead, but something should be done to it if it was used. The overhead is another clear CMK preference. Again the padding actually looks like padding and there are actual details incorporated, that again while not necessarily exactly accurate, are appealing. Again, the overhead panel is a VAST improvement over the kit panel. Both panels have interpreted the million reset buttons as grooved lines but hopefully I can work on that when I build it. Strangely The CMK panel includes one of the hand aimed spot lights but not the other on the other side of the panel. I thought that kind of odd. So that was as far as I took it today. At first I thought that there was very little improvement over the kit parts to warrant the cost of the CMK parts but I think I have changed my mind. Assuming the CMK parts are a good fit into the body shell, there is no possibility that I would consider the kit parts as better. If the for some reason there is an extremely poor fit I will still be taking what I can from the CMK parts and installing them. I still have a lot of PE additions that will also be added to the interior so if all goes right it should be a very interesting focal point of the model, as it should be. It is kind of strange as my memories of Hueys are primarily from looking out from the inside. Other people are probably more familiar with the view of looking in from the outside, or just seeing the outside.

Doesn't look as much like dust as it looks like snow Jack.

That is the one thing I miss on this build. If it had people it would be beyond anything possible to believe, It is already possibly the best ship build I have ever seen!

HA, At last we beat out the officers on something! My Hooch maid was really quite good looking and young, I suspect she was half French. More than one of the guys tried to get extra service out of her but were turned down every time. She would have nothing to do with it even though she could have made ten times the money. We made it as clear as possible to any New Meat that arrived that she was not to be pressured too hard as we really valued the quality of her work and didn't want to loose her. Even at her young age she was "Mamma San" to us. I had forgotten about the smell of their cooking. Ours used a bucket and washboard for scrubbing but when they were done your uniform was CLEAN like no washing machine has ever done. I assume when you say $2 US you meant MPC. I didn't see a greenback but once or twice my whole time there.

That's kind of strange. The decal sheet gives you all of those minute decals covering every detail possible on the aircraft and then gives you additional identification decals to denote a particular aircraft but does not give you the names of the crewmen, one of the things that is almost always present on modern day aircraft. I envy your ability to produce the master quality you achieve in your builds. You always seem to know exactly where you are going with each build and carry it through with perfection.

Thanks Ken I know that people like you Jack, Mark and possibly others understand my ramblings as like I said somewhere we could probably sit across from one another and have complete understanding without saying a word. It is the people who were doing something else fifty years ago who I think don't really understand my ramblings. Or possibly it is just me who doesn't understand. Thanks for the link there is stuff there that can still be of use in my build. I think I am about done stocking up on aftermarket and it is time to weed through the mess and pick the best of what I have. I do like the Kitty Hawk Huey in 1/35th that they are supposed to be coming out with. The artwork looks like it will be a great model. But hopefully I will be able to do this one properly and not mess it up so bad that I need to buy a do over model. I do have some pretty cool aftermarket crewmen. They have FANTASTIC detail and pretty good poses. The pilots are perfect and works of art in their own right. One of the gunners looks just like me and will go in the right door! Well I kind of looked like that 50 years ago when I was too young to vote and before I became old and broken! I suppose we all looked kind of the same when you come to think of it but I did have my helmet painted and I think I will be able to duplicate that even in this small scale, At least I will try. It wasn't all that complicated of a design. The crewmen is the part I am looking forward to the most in this build. The Huey is just a machine, a tool if you will. The people bring it to life.

Yeah we had a couple of officers like that. REMFs that had no idea just where they were. They either changed or left to parts unknown. I had forgotten about possibly our worst until reading your account. For a VERY short time we were assigned a Lieutenant Colonel straight out of the Pentagon it was rumored. Like several officers before and later he was there to get his combat time so he could make full Colonel. Why he was assigned to a flying unit I will never understand, I think the bond between Pilots and crew is a little closer than in many other branches of the military and the separation between officer and enlisted while still observed is also more respectful, in both directions. At any rate, within a week of taking over one of the many changes and possibly most egregious alteration he made was that each morning the enlisted and non com personal would gather on the flight field for 30 minutes of calisthenics like in basic training! Officers were not included. You can guess that this went down like a lead balloon. After just a few days of this the uproar became intense especially among crewmen as we were already getting up before dawn on many days to get the chopper ready for the days operations. Not all days, but many. When it reached the point that it was obvious that this fool saw no problem with gathering a couple of hundred people in relatively concentrated groups at the same place and time every day, was pure insanity while in a combat zone. I think our officers stepped in for us. While they never really said anything official against the Colonel's practice, at least in mixed public, the practice was withdrawn within a week or two. I think they may have informed him of the practice of fragging that was supposedly popular in some units. His other "reforms" also went by the wayside shortly as virtually without notice he left for parts unknown and was replaced. Yes, promotions for us came fairly fast as well. I never reached E5 even though not long before my ETS they sent me off to NCO Academy, probably as an inducement to reenlist. I think my VRB would have been $10k I can't remember, but it almost certainly would have meant another tour and six more years with possibly more tours. I was not told that we were winding down in Vietnam. How rude of them. I could have possibly gotten to go to Germany, (With my wife) or England or the other places the older NCOs talked about as great duty stations. But I was sick of Vietnam and wanted to go home and left when my time came. We has housemaids because the system was set up that way. My buddy and I resisted it at first because it cost us out of our pay each month and even with flight pay, overseas pay, (Less than $2 if I remember right) and combat pay, E4 pay was pretty slim. But we soon learned that if you wanted to get your uniforms and boots done properly and not have to take precious time that could be better used for sleeping and eating, you paid for a housemaid, (Or Hoochmaid) to take care of the Army stuff. Besides they did a better job! In my tour I lived in two locations. One had wooden hooches with sand bag decorations and the other was large tents. To be honest I don't know which was better/worse. I don't think the Army had "Sub standard housing pay" If they did they didn't tell us. I think they should have had sub standard base location pay. It seemed like the Army got what was left over after all of the other services got the good places! I call that "Petting your models" OC It is permissible in non mixed company but it is rumored that you can go blind if you do it too often. May be why I need to wear glasses these days as I do it all of the time.

The difference is amazing. Can I send you my PE guns to build for me when I get enough courage to start building my Houston?

How come everyone else is able to say it better than I can. Explaining it to others always seems to be just a jumble of words to me and never seems to convey what it is like inside. I finally received the last of my aftermarket parts from 1001 in France after about six or somethings weeks I got the chance to look them over and to be honest I am wondering if may have wasted my money. What I bought was the CMK Master Kits resin main cargo compartment and cockpit areas. In both cases there are two concerns First and foremost is a question of if the aftermarket is really an improvement over the stuff supplied in the kit. The Dragon kit even though it is a rebox of an older kit by another manufacturer is still a good and relatively detailed and as far as I can remember, accurate model, and does not really need much if any aftermarket to build a nice accurate model, at least when it comes to the plastic parts of the model. The CMK resin stuff is very well cast but like almost all resin castings has a lot of flash that needs to either be cut off with a saw or cleaned up. One delicate part in the cargo set was broken and actually missing the broken part so I will have to find a replacement for that part at the very least. But then I may just scratch build those parts as I am not completely happy with the kit parts or the aftermarket parts. Some of the same things hold for the cabin floor and roof there are obvious preferences between the kit and aftermarket roof, floor, and engine bulkhead. I have contemplated a mix match between kit and resin but there are some differences in size and I am not certain it can be done. I will know more when I get all of the flash removed from the resin parts. The pilot seats are pretty nice but even with my failing memory I do not remember ever seeing the armor part of the seat that looks like these do. The CMK armor of the seat itself is much more sculpted than I remember. What my memory shows my mind is a slab sided flat backed welded bunch of metal that was fully functional and not graceful at all. The kit supplies this type of seat. The kit dash is as far as I can see at this point, hands down the jewel if the model and will be hard to match under any conditions let alone excel. The CMK version just gives you two dash choices. A paper printed dash and a film dash. If I was doing a night time with lights build then the film version would be great as it would allow back lit gauges. Again there could be a possibility of mix and match that I will look into later. So all and all that is where the hole thing stands at this point. I have virtually everything I need to start building so hopefully things will become more interesting soon with pictures and stuff.

Looks like another mistake on my part Mark. I had no idea when I sent it that it was going to be that nice of a kit. Send it back! No, really Mark, it is right where it belongs just like we discussed. A CH-53 has to be your build not mine. Besides I will have my hands full with my Huey. I have been going through my new parts and to be honest I am kind of mixed about what I got. I may have wasted a lot of money. I will try and get pictures and comments over the next day or two. Most of today was spent on Honey Do's and all I really had time for was a fairly thorough look over.

I suppose that is my most open wound as well Ken even though I don't think I even desired thanks so much as to not be branded as a war monger or baby killer, or broken person just because I went where my Government sent me and tried to do a credible job. I think much of the time I just wanted to come back home in as few pieces as possible. Preferably one! I don't think of myself as overly patriotic, or brave or anything else. I just tried to do what was expected and was too stupid to say no. I wish one of by buddies from fifty years ago lived across town right now. I can't help but think we could sit across from one another over a drink and not say a word and understand everything. No explanations are needed for a shared life. (Or at least for a short period of shared life). In fact we would probably spend more time catching up than reminiscing.

More like a senior condition it seems.

I have always known that the I-400 class was big but I have never actually seen the decks populated with people for a reference. That last picture is a real eye opener for me!

See that shows you how feeble the mind has become over the years. It was 69-70 and it was Specialist 4th class or as we called it Spec 4. We had Corporals as well even though they were as rare as hens teeth. An E-4 Corporal was in charge of people, usually in a squad or some such infantry type unit. A Specialist was as you probably know just a body filling a slot and not necessarily in charge of other people. I have no idea where I cam up with Specialist first class. My parts came in from France at last so I now have no excuse but to jump in and see how badly I blotch this whole idea. I have a picture in my mind of what I want but as we can all see, my mind may have some serious faults when it comes to connecting with my fingers! Get my honey do's done and try and get a little modeling underway for better or worse.