With 1/72 scale Seahawk kits available from two major manufacturers for decades, I'm surprised neither has issued additional parts to make the colorful U.S. Coast Guard Jayhawk. HobbyBoss' kit, and sister kits SH-60B Seahawk, SH-60F Ocean Hawk, and HH-60H Rescue Hawk, are all new. The parts are nicely molded and, overall, fit well.
In addition to parts peculiar to the Jayhawk, the six sprues include weapons and sensors (and even another complete cabin floor) for other versions. The parts maps do not indicate the unused parts. Decals are included for one Coast Guard Jayhawk.
There are a lot of interior seats to add on this rescue bird, but be careful boring out the indicated holes in the cabin floor for the seat mounts; it is easy to make them too large and cause the seats to sit too low. I was disappointed that no collective controls were provided for the cockpit. In real life, these are obvious and substantial with all their additional switches and knobs.
Building and painting helicopter models is always complicated for me. The large windows and hatches produce difficult masking and paint-sequence decisions. Complicate it further with an intricate, glossy paint scheme and it's easy to see why more than half of the time I spent on the model went into the finish. I decided to paint the fuselage halves white (flat white for coverage, then gloss white for sheen) before installing the interior and closing. Then I masked and painted the canopy flat black off the model. After installing the canopy, I masked the model for the orange.
The instructions say simply "red," but this color is closer to international orange (FS12197). However, I prefer the redder Testors Boyd sunburst for this color, as it looks better in fluorescent light (how most of my models are displayed). After touching up the seams with white, I sprayed the orange.
The decals are good, but the tiny shield in the Coast Guard emblem has blue stripes instead of red. I had trouble with the large "USCG" on the belly. The clear film is very flimsy and shaped closely around and inside the letters. Just moving the wet decals into position caused them to "worm" and tangle badly. Don't look at the bottom of my Jayhawk.
Final assembly included adding the peripherals and rotors. The anhedral of the fins on the auxiliary fuel tanks is too shallow. The nose radome is perfectly round, but photos of Jayhawks show the cross section is a larger oval. Some missing details include the prominent "RV" mirrors, pitot tubes, and antenna masts on the starboard side of the tail boom. A good source of detailed Jayhawk photos is
Modeler's Close-up #9, HH-60J Jayhawk/MH-60S Knighthawk, available in PDF format (for a price) from Dataview Publishing at
www.dataviewbooks.com.
After 31 hours, the HobbyBoss Jayhawk really livens up my helicopter collection. It's not a perfect kit (what is?), but right now it's the only out-of-the-box Jayhawk in any scale. Hey, there's one right now on "Deadliest Catch"!
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