Trumpeter 1/35 scale MiL-8 Hip-H, kit number 05102 By Jon Fincher

Growing up in the shadow of the Sikorsky plant in southern Connecticut, I've been a fan of rotary wing and VTOL aircraft since I was a youngster. It's no surprise that my most recent foray into the world of scale model military aircraft took the form of Trumpeter's MiL Mi-8MT/Mi-17 Hip-H helicopter. I had the benefit of an excellent reference book specific to the model, titled MiL Mi-8/Mi-17: Rotary-Wing Workhorse and Warhorse by Yefim Gordon and Dmitry Komissarov, Red Star Volume 14 from Midland Publishing.

The Mi-8, designed in 1959 by Mikhail Leontyevich Mil's design bureau, is the the only helicopter that has been used in every type of mission for which helicopters are designed, including passenger service, VIP transport, cargo hauling, flying crane, military transport and assault, close air support of ground troops, search and rescue, firefighting, and more. The twin engine, single five-bladed rotor design has been in constant production for almost forty years since the first rolled off the assembly line in 1966. Almost 11,000 of these workhorses have been built to date compared to similar Western helicopters of which there have only been 1,500 Sikorsky S-61 Sea Kings, 740 Boeing V-107 Sea Knights, and 105 Aeorspatiale SA 321 Super Frelons. Mi-8s have been used by at least fifty different nations, and not all of them Eastern bloc - Belgium, France, West Germany, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Britain, and even the U.S. count among the countries using them for both military and civilian roles, along with the Palestinian Authority.

INITIAL IMPRESSIONS

My first impression on seeing the kit was that the large scale (1:35) meant there would be impressive amounts of detail, and there are over 200 pieces on six reasonably flash-free gray plastic sprues, two clear sprues, a tree of photo-etch, and a small acetate sheet with instrument panel details. A single decal sheet was also provided, along with a sheet of painting suggestions.

A friend of mine refers to this next step as "the fondle" - picking up and looking at (and of course, feeling) the sprues. There are an impressive number of "fiddly bits" (another term stolen from a fellow modeler) - small parts meant to add detail. The largest pieces are the fuselage halves, around two feet long and 4-5 inches wide, but the smallest are some door handles, around 1/8th by 1/16th of an inch square. If you have an active carpet monster living under your workspace, take steps to neutralize it - some of those fiddly bits are very aerodynamic and rather tasty appetizers for shag and pile carpeting (more on that later).

I was also intrigued by the openness of the sprues - in models from other manufacturers, sprues are jammed with parts, leaving a bare minimum of space between parts to conserve space. Trumpeter took a different tack, adding sprues to keep the parts count per sprue down. It gives you plenty of room to get a knife or snippers in to cut the pieces free - I think I like it.

BEGINNING CONSTRUCTION

The kit instructions start with building the two turbine engines that power the MiL-8. These took with more effort than I expected to get together. The canisters for the turbines have plenty of detail on them in the form of rivets and cooling fins but are molded in two halves. After putting them together I spent a good deal of time with files and sandpaper trying to clean up the edges. This was largely a wasted effort as my final model is posed with the engine hatches closed. If you want the engine hatches closed too concentrate on the detail for the intake and exhaust as they're the only parts visible from the outside of the model.

Once the engines were done they were placed into a rather sparse-looking engine compartment. There's a lot of room here to add detail if you want since the engine hatches can be posed open. Be careful when gluing the engines down on their supports because later on you'll be threading the final exhaust port through a hole in the fuselage and if the engines are misplaced, even a little, the fit of the exhaust ports won't be correct. You can wait until the fuselage comes together to do the final fit.

The entire engine compartment sits on the roof of the interior cabin, which has ejector pin marks all over the visible side. Since the roof has crossmembers molded into it the ejector marks land right in the middle of each molded square, making them almost impossible to sand. If I were detailing the interior I'd scratch build a new roof with sheet and strip styrene.

The cockpit was next. Seats are black leather and Trumpeter provides photoetched seat belts. The instructions aren't very clear about where the lap belts attach to the seat so I took a guess based on my reference book. There are also two small fans that mount on a ceiling control panel, made from some very small plastic parts with photoetch for the blades. My built version will not have any fans as one was eaten by the floor monster under my bench. HINT: When building the fans, twist the photoetch blades before gluing them to the styrene body. It's much easier than trying to hold the fan body and twist the blades, which is how one of the fans got away from me.

There's a lot of detail in the cockpit; four separate pieces make up the ceiling control panels assembly, there are two standing panels with acetate dials, and a small center panel display. The cockpit is molded together with the cargo bay, with a double-bulkhead hatch between them. The cockpit and cargo bay floors and hatch all feature good recessed details. Standard flight
controls complete the cockpit and show good detail for the scale. My one complaint is the roominess of the kit's cockpit. There's enough space for a hoedown in there, which doesn't fit with my references.

The instructions start to get a little wonky around page eight. The headstock for the main rotor is next to be built but with no color choices provided I had to wing it (no pun intended). However, once it was complete I was ready to contemplate assembling the fuselage. After shooting interior gray on the detailed interior and installing the port lights I added three exhaust ports and two photoetched intake covers. They have to be installed before fuselage assembly but since they are visible from the exterior they'll have to be carefully masked when you reach the painting stage.

The cockpit bulkhead assembly has slots that fit positively over some beefy tabs in the fuselage halves. The fit was a little snug, which provided a lot of strength to the whole assembly and required no glue. The engine and rotor headstock assemblies have tabs that slide loosely into slots in the fuselage halves but the interior roof assembly needs to slide over the cockpit bulkhead and some ridges on the fuselage walls; this was a little tricky. Gluing the two halves also took a little doing. I did mention that this model is over two feet long, right? I started at the front and worked my way along the dorsal, down the tail, and along the belly, clamping as I went. The fit of the fuselage halves was less than perfect. There is a small step down from port to starboard and the open porthole over the cockpit had some rounded corners that
need to be replaced. If I had it to do over I'd sand off the locater pins so I could get the alignment right without major work.

The rest of the fuselage is in more manageable bits; clamshell doors for the rear cargo loading area, de-icing unit and engine bay covers on top, port and starboard fuel tanks on the sides, and the single clear canopy piece and side windows to close up the front. Gluing the clamshell doors is a little tricky but manageable. The canopy is very thin and flexible. It reminds me of a good vacformed replacement canopy but with much better detail. Some good engineering went into placing some of these parts on the sprues. The attachment points for the fuel tank are on the glue surface, not on the exterior, which I found very refreshing (too bad they couldn't do that for the fuselage halves). The rear cargo doors and engine bay covers can be posed open but require more work to both add interior detail and clean up some rough edges where the interior floor meet the rear cargo opening before doing so. While these pieces are being added, the instructions have you adding tons of fiddly bits - exterior door handles, rearview mirrors, grab holds, etc. I left them off until the whole bird was painted lest I break them off during normal handling.

PAINTING

I found a set of Black Magic masks for this model, which made masking the Future-coated canopy and side windows easier. There are tons of color schemes to choose from, but since my skills at painting camouflage are pretty poor I decided to hone them a bit with a simple Russian camo scheme. Detail was picked out with a brush.

The Black Magic masks fit well on the cockpit windows but have some problems burnishing down on the compound curves. I shot the canopy with clear before applying paint to help control bleed under on the canopy but it didn't work as well as I had hoped. Some polishing compound on a cotton swab and some brushed on Future cleared that problem up (again, no pun intended). The Black Magic set provides a set of wheel hub masks which are almost completely useless - the wheels and hubs are molded separately, so you don't need to mask anything to paint them. There is also a set of masks for the porthole windows, but I found that they tend to pop out while applying the masks - clear parts cement isn't strong enough to handle the stress of burnishing. Taking a tip from a club member I popped all the windows out, filed down part of the lip that holds them in, and slid them in from the outside after painting the rest of the fuselage.

Masking this beast for painting is a bear. As mentioned above, there are five different exhaust and intake ports that were added from the inside. I found these almost impossible to mask around so out they came to be replaced after painting. This left numerous voids to fill around the engine compartment, main rotor headstock, and port cargo bay door, which I packed with paper towels. Luckily no further touchup was necessary there.

Masking the now empty porthole openings was relatively easy, given the right tools. From previous auto servicing, I had some cardboard and plastic sleeves that covered the electrodes of spark plug sets I had bought. These protective barrels are about an inch and half long and half an inch across - cutting them lengthwise and rolling them a little tighter let them fit into the portholes, then spring out to expand to fill the opening. A little tape on the end, and I had some custom masks for otherwise impossible to mask openings. Masking these openings can be done from the inside if the rear cargo bay doors are left open.

Holding this beast for painting was also a chore. Painting the bottom was the tough part. I managed to make a jig to hold the fuselage from the top so I could paint the underside blue on the bottom. Once the bottom was painted it was masked around the edges and I could rest the body on the lazy susan in the floor of my spray booth to paint the sides. A base of stone covered the body, and a gray-green was used to complete the camo pattern. I freehanded the camo pattern using light air pressure and a delicate touch on the paint flow. For my first camo paint job, I was happy.

After removing the fuselage masks I applied the decals for my chosen scheme. The decals with the kit are superb. Thin and colorful, they release from the backing paper quickly, have little to no excess clear carrier film, respond very well to decal setting solutions, and settled in nicely under a flat coat. Complete decals for three different paint schemes are provided.

ROTORS

The main rotor is a 24 piece assembly (not counting the cap) that seemed overly complicated for the final result. Five small inner blades float freely in a rotor hub assembly. Between the hub and inner blades are two pieces per blade representing the blade pitch and angle control arms. Collective control arms on the hub are also separate pieces, as are the main blades. This seeming overcomplication wasn't difficult to either assemble or paint although it does force the blades into a static configuration. The tail rotor, by comparison, is a single molded piece with body pieces representing the tail shaft and gear drive and went together smoothly. After some minor cleanup and inspection of the sprues for missing parts (found one, no problem), I called it done.

There is one BIG problem with the main rotor; the blades are very heavy. Too heavy, in fact, to be supported positively by the flimsy plastic angle control and blade pitch pieces. It doesn't matter what kind of glue you use on these pieces, they're simply not strong enough to support the blades. I found when I put the main rotor on that its weight was too much and pieces broke, causing the blades to droop down from their rotor attachment points. There are a number of solutions that were suggested by fellow modellers, but I went for simple, if not accurate. With the main rotor upside down and the blades held at the correct angles to the rotor, I flooded the joint with five minute epoxy. Leaving it to cure for 2-3 hours, I flipped the rotor upright to find the blades sat perfectly, with a realistic droop in them this time. Modellers wanting something more realistic will have to find other solutions.

FINAL ASSEMBLY

With a completed fuselage and rotor assembly I moved on to the landing gear next. The rear landing gears were a little tricky to attach. There are three points on the body to attach the struts to, and one connection between the underside struts and the side strut. Getting everything into place and solid with CA took some fiddling, and getting the second side done was trickier still. I wound up laying the model on its side, supporting the upper hull with a small parts cup, and hanging the already-attached gear on one side off the edge of my bench while I worked to attach the gear on other side. The nose gear, with a single post into a single hole, went in quickly and cleanly after that, and I had something that looked like an aircraft.

Fiddly bits were last. There are a lot of antennae, running lights, door handles, bump-outs, and other such styrene and photoetched pieces that would have been broken during masking and painting that needed to go in now. All but the lights were attached with CA and brush painted in place. The lights were brush painted with clear acrylic color, back painted with metalizer, then glued into place with clear parts glue. There are also two extra armored fuselage plates that attach outboard and below the main canopy. These were airbrushed and attached with CA, along with some photoetched rearview mirror assemblies.

SUMMARY

Trumpeter has done some things right with this model; big open sprues, lots of built in detail with plenty of room to add more, good multimedia accessories, some good engineering of parts placement - and some things wrong; some wonky engineering of parts placement, ejector pin marks in impossible to remove places, and inconsistent assembly and painting instructions.

When weighing the pros and cons, there are also some other things to consider. This is a big model when it's complete. Unless you've got the shelf space for it, I'd leave it at the store in favor of a 1/48th or 1/72nd scale version.

The parts range from huge (fuselage) to tiny (exterior door handles). If you're getting a big scale model because your eyes can no longer handle God's scale (1/48th) nor eyestrain scale (1/72nd), you're in for a struggle working with all the fiddly bits.

If you're looking for something big with lots of detail, be ready for a small surprise. The amount of detail on this bird is relatively low for the scale. The cargo bay and engine compartment are very sparse on detail, and while the cockpit has some good detail in it, it appears to be nowhere near as cramped as it should be. Be ready to add some more detail as you go along.

However, if the size and parts range don't scare you, and you're confident enough to scratch-built more detail and interest into it, don't let the other cons of this model put you off either. With the exception of the ejector pin marks on the interior roof, none of them are insurmountable, and you may have some fun figuring out how to get it from big box o'styrene to award-winning model. This is a great platform for some superdetailing work. The scale means it will fit into an armor diorama fairly well, and the kit can be converted into one of two dozen different variants serving Iron Curtain and other countries for the past forty years.