History
(to be added))

The kit
Something I bought at the beginning of December, knowing I won't get any models for Christmas

I was surprised to see how big Apache is It's barely smaller than my Su-25; if I'd take the wings and engine nacells of, they would be pretty similar in size. MiG-29, F/A-18 Hornet and MiG-21 aren't much bigger than it, either. I always imagined it as something very small compared to a fighter... Well, I've never seen a real Apache, maybe that's the reason

The vehicle itself may seem complicated at first, but in reality it's not that difficult to finish. Parts are fitting well: because this model was ment as a stress-reliever, I didn't use putty at all. They might be some cracks between the parts, but I don't care. Cockpit is rather simple, with two sets of seats, joysticks and control panels. You can put decals on them, but I didn't, I was too lazy to do that. I only painted the seats with light olive paint as suggested by instruction.

All in all, I finished most of the helicopter in one day; had I had more time, I'd finish it in one weekend. Sadly, when I went back to Poznan, some of the pieces were lost during my absence - including one of the hardpoints I had to scratch two for the Hellfire missiles, and you can see they are different from the Hydra 70 pylons. The Hellfire missiles themselves were a small nightmare: eight of them, each having two yellow decals, and having to be hang on small, two-piece hardpoints Sadly, I've lost some of my decals - they simply refused to keep in place :angry: So I used a masking tape to replace them. Additionaly, one of the decals had slid off its place, ut fortunately that missile is placed on the inner side of the hardpoint (close to the hull), so unless you are looking from below, you can't see it.

I used Pactra's RAF Dark Green, because of all my paints it was the closest to real-life Apache colour. I also used black Pactra for rotor blades, but it didn't look very well, so I used another layer of black Humbrol.

The kit comes with two optional decals set (and elements, like radar antenna on the top of the rotor), one for U.S. Army and one for Royal Netherland Air Force. It tempted me to do the latter version, but then I thought "ah, heck, I haven't make any American kit in a long time", besides I'm hunting for Fokker D.XXI fighter I also want to make in Netherland markings (though in ones from WW2 rather than modern times).

All in all, if you are looking for some nice weekend kit, this is not the one. It requires a lot of attention and precision (my lead fingers were not helping at all ) to deal with the tiny parts, which were often too small for my pincers to catch them. But once you overcome this difficulty, you get some really nice kit for your 1/144 collection.

Model: Revell
Paints: Pactra
Scale: 1/144