It all started when I finished my DAP Blackhawk last February 2004, the idea came to me to create my favourite helo the SH-60 Seahawk or one of it’s famous family members. With the help of Robert Wake who’s flying for HSL 43 Battlecats, I came to know him when he got in touch with me about my Cobra 1/48 SH-60B. And with the help of lots of pics from the book Close-Up No1 U.S. Navy Seahawk Family by by Philippe Dognon and Christian Bouschon and the book Black Hawk by S.F. Tomajczyk both books are an absolute must when building any Black of Seahwak related helo,..... great stuff.

This is no guide about the way I created this helo because I did not make any pictures during the building of it. I just wanted to concentrate on creating a HH-60 H in the best possible way............

Basically I used a Academy DAP Blackhawk.
When you look on both the fuselage left and right side there lots of things on it which have to be deleted in order to get some smooth halves with what you can start as a good base. Than both the gunner windows have to be closed, on the left side the complete slidingdoor has to be closed and resized to get the smaller windows.

On the right side the opening of the door has to be made smaller and the door needs only one bigger window.
Lot’s of items were built from scratch like, f.i. the diving board, all the antennas on both sides and underneath the nose and back on the tail, the pylons on both sides of the helo, the folding system support in red was made from aluminum rods and of course the 2 small sliding windows on the left side.
Both the windows of the frontdoors had to be replaced by new ones and also the mirrors had to be made from scratch.

A rather tricky part was creating the new wheelcovers and closing up the holes of the Blackhawk, where normally the big shockabsorbers are mounted.

Cutting the tail with movable hinges was a bit of challenge but as you can see it worked out properly.
The rotorhead with the folded blades was also a tricky part, as the rotorhead is much more complicated than the one of the Blackhawk, but pictures in the book CloseUp No 1 helped me out perfectly.
The Hellfire rockets are from the DAP Blackhawk, the FLIR/laser is a leftover from Cobra..

The paints used are the new Tamiya spraycan colours Light and Dark Ghost Grey AS25 and AS26.
Decals are from mostly Micro and Supercale, with leftovers I was able to create some names of pilots and the squadron name....

Oh yes I know, some things are not quite the way they should be and perhaps I forgot to mention the changes of some other parts of the helo................but it all gave me a lot of fun building this machine and when I look at it...................It sits just right !!!!

Photos and text © 2005 by Jan M. Visser

May 15 2005

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