1/72 Airfix Ka-25

by Jon H. Ruehle

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This is the Airfix Ka-25 Soviet naval helicopter in 1/72 scale. The kit is a “4” on the 0-10 scale (10 being perfect) as far as kit quality and realism is concerned for several reasons.

The mechanical section of the counter-rotating rotor head leaves a little to be desired after studying some of the real aircraft.

The landing gear is a molded one-piece affair with an integral wheel, instead of separate parts making up gear assembly. I replaced the main gear wheels with a set from a parts box. Nose wheels are the same.

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The windows are a joke!  In scale they are at least 4” thick and in some instances are probably close to 8”. Many of the windows had sinkholes in the center of each. I got rid of the sinkholes by wet sanding the hole with 400, then 800, then 1500 grit sand paper. After that I dried them and applied a coat of thin CA, and then Future, rendering the sinkholes and scratches nearly invisible.  Two cabin windows have been left “open”.

The Interior cabin lacks any detail other than a seat behind the cockpit bulkhead. I added a ceiling and a bulkhead behind the side door, whether the real aircraft had one or not!

I studied some photos of the actual Ka-25 and saw that the rotor blades had considerable sag when parked, so I carefully worked on bending the existing rotors so that they had a similar weighted sag to them. I broke two blades in the process, but after gluing them back into shape, they looked just fine.  Next time around, I will be sure to glue the blades onto the hub at the very end of the construction process. The Airfix plastic is brittle.

I replaced the tree-trunk sized pushrods on the main rotors with stretched sprue. One mistake I made was building up the rotor sets so that both top and bottom rotor rotated the same direction. I ended up cutting off one set of blades and flipping each upside down and re-attaching each so they were oriented in the right direction. Wouldn’t you know it, I flipped the wrong set of blade upside down, so now the rotor sets spin opposite of the real aircraft!! The multiple sets of swashplates needed to be thinned out considerably, which I did not do. The second Ka-25 will be better, I promise (yeahright)!

I airbrushed a coat of some Humbrol grey color, who knows what it was. Then the entire model was airbrushed in Model Master clear gloss, decals went on, and I then applied my first ever “acrylic wash”. I used “Titanium White” and “Lamp Black” with water as a thinner. What fun. It turned out OK, but I have a long way to go on my skill set for this type of activity. 

Jon

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Photos and text © by Jon H. Ruehle