Kit 2 - Fairey Rotodyne

In my last post I described how, after all of my bluster about not wanting to get into Airfix modelling again after a gap of 50 years, I had bought and built a model of the Bristol Belvedere helicopter. Well, since then I have made rather a nice painting of the Grumman Widgeon/ Gosling, another kit I wish I’d made back in the day.

Grumman Gosling/Widgeon

But I also bought a Fairey Rotodyne kit off eBay.

The Belvedere was just the dry run, to show me if I still possessed the very basic model making skills to do something vaguely recognisable. But the rotodyne was the one I was really interested in.

What a journey this kit took me on! For one thing it was an eBay buy, so to that extent it was a gamble. The bag of parts was sealed, but there were two small parts missing and one of the propellers was broken. I fixed the propeller and I had bought a small model making took kit from Amazon, and what with this and my Dremel I managed to bodge copies of the missing parts. I’d also bought some proper model making acrylic paints. I completed the painting of the interior and the pilots and the build on Saturday. I’d forgotten the frustration of small pieces pinging off into the carpet and then melting into the ether. I lost one of the window pieces and had to make a new one out of a piece of clear plastic. Then one of the small wheels on the front did the same, and I had to make one.

On Saturday night two of the rotor blades fell off, leaving their ends in the holes. It took some ingenuity and not a little swearing to bodge them back in and make them secure. I hand painted the model – not having and airbrush I didn’t get perfect results – and then applied the decals. I was worried about these considering the age of the kit and indeed one of them disintegrated before application. Still, a judicious bit of paint disguised this. The rest were applied and proved less fiddly than the modern decals in the Belvedere kit.

So here it is. Very far from perfect, but better than I did with the Belvedere and I’ve learned quite a bit from it.