Piasecki HUP-2 Retreiver

by Markus Wuellner

Battle Axe's 1/48 scale HUP-2 Helicopter is available online from Squadron

This is my 1/48 scale Piasecki HUP-2 Retreiver produced by French company Battle Axe.

Like most other limited run kits made by Battle Axe or Mach 2 the HUP-2 is a quite simple mixed media kit. It consists of only two injection moulded fuselage halfs and one extra sprue with rather crude smaller parts like the rotor blades, landing gear, rotor heads and cabin details.

An extra PE fret with various cockpit and rotor parts is also included. The canopy and all other windows are vacformed.

All the above mentioned parts are in my opinion by no means enough to build a sufficiently detailed Retreiver. Especially the interior needs a lot more attention.

The cladding on the inside of the cabin walls is not well presented in the kit so I used 0,01mm aluminium foil in which I "rolled" the stiched seams with a Dremel Motor Tool. After drybrushing and weathering the cladding looks far more realistic.

Further I decided to scratch all the interior cabin-spars as they are totally missing in the kit.

The pilot's compartment looks okay after the kit supplied PE parts were used. The supplied landing gear parts are too crude to use it so I scratch built them by using various sizes of evergreen rods and tubes.

Markings are included for four different versions including one French Navy machine.

I decided to go the "high viz" route and used the markings for a US Navy / HU-1 machine. All the painting was done using X-tracolor enamels.

The quality of the decals is okay but I turned to Superscale for the national insignia.

The kit is truly not "shake and bake", but for me it was a lot of fun.

The shape and the dimensions seem correct to me so Battle Axe's kit represents a very good starting point. Turning this rather basic kit into a nice replica of this truly classic helicopter was quite a challenge to me.

I waited a long time for any 1/48 scale HUP-2 kit and the Battle Axe release is the only game in town so.... thank you Battle Axe!

 

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Model, Images and Text Copyright © 2003 by Markus Wuellner
Page Created 25 July, 2003
Last Updated 17 March, 2004

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