1/72 Zvezda Ka - 27 / 28

Gallery Article by Aamod Potdar on Aug 15 2015

India Independence Day

 

      

Ka - 27 / 28 Indian Navy

I have been recently bitten by Heli bug and since then I have started building choppers apart from regular fixed winged aircraft. I always found the Kamov used by the Indian Navy very interesting thanks to their co-axial rotors. 

The Indian Navy uses a Ka-28 version which is nothing but an export version of original Ka-27.  The closest kit available in the market is the Zvezda kit.  Though one does need to make some modifications to get it close to Indian variant. 

I really enjoyed this build because it involved lot of scratch building which I had never done before and it has now made me more confident with my scratch building skills.

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Since I belong to Indian Scale Modelers group on Facebook, lots of my fellow modelers had already built this particular kit. Which indeed made my job easy as I had list of modifications ready. Plus of-late I have got more confident with scratch building parts using plastic cards. 

List of modification made or required for Indian Navy version :

  • 1. Rear window on the starboard side needs to be filled. 

  • 2. Front window on the port side needs to be filled. 

  • 3. Cockpit window on the starboard side needs more deep bulge. They call it bubble window. (i skipped it)

  • 4. Triangular antennas above the cockpit and tail needs to replaced with 3 probe antenna. 

  • 5. Square boxes near the rear landing gear assembly on both the side. (where serial number 582 is placed)

  • 6. Another fuel tank like assembly on both the sides just above the rear wheels. 

Though the modification list looks comprehensive, it very easy to scratch build them using sandwiching plastic cards and even used thick sprue set. 

The Indian Navy also used low visibility all grey scheme, so this kit was painted using airbrush using acrylics. For decals, the roundels came from BrightSpark decal sheets and Navy decal was printed on waterslide decal paper.  Decals were designed by one of th fellow modelers from the Indian Scale Modelers. A coat of future and matt varnish to finish the job. I am planning to build diorama of a helipad on an Indian Navy ship, but that might take some time. 

Dedicating this build to India's 69th Independence Day on 15th August 2015.

Jai Hind

Aamod Potdar   Indian Scale Modellers

Photos and text © by Aamod Potdar