Alouette III "Slick", 1/72, Heller

[Hajo L.]

Some already saw my in-progress "Killer-Egg" Alouette III, and thi sis the current development of the second kit I bought of this nice little helicopter.

This one is going to be a troop carrier or "Slick", and the correlance to the old rhodesian birds is no accident.

I´m using mostly 1:87 figures by Preiser for this, they have several advantages:

- They are small enough to fit in the cockpit without problems

- They have excellently sculpted faces

- They come in "normal" plastic that is easy to work with

What we do have here are sitting german grenadiers from WW2 (Preiser), a set of german Bundeswehr paratroopers and a set of different Machineguns (here: german MG3s), both sets by ROCO.

Even though the Preiser grenadiers look quite WW2-like, it´s pretty easy to get rid of the typical items like boots, insignias and pockets by simply sanding them off.

Here you can see my 4-man-team after the removal of all WW2-german items and the handing out of different equipment.

From left to right:

Sniper with a G3 assault rifle, equipped with a scope (made by sprue) and a light anti-tank weapons (also sprue). Next one - simple soldier, G3 and stuff, maybe the medic. Machine-gunner with a MG3 and finally the radio-operator with a radio and some smoke and frag-grenades on his chest.

Next pictures show the little force after painting. I painted them in some different camoflages to present the style of a more mixed unit which is not part of a 1st world military force.

The machine-gunner received some photo-etched ammo, it looks really good, even at that smale scale.

Rucksacks and bags are in a single colour, khaki.

And a first dry-seating-test in the helicopter. The pair of the port-side has to be seated a bit more to the front because there will be a doorgunner also on that side.

HAJO

[Hajo L.]

Little update, I had some time and took care of the door-mounted MG3 machinegun. Scratched a nice little mount and had the gunner test-seating his new position.

The co-pilot also got a little map to navigate his aircraft safely into trouble... ;)

HAJO