Legato 1/72 Lockheed AH-56 Cheyenne

LEGATO 1:72 AH-56 CHEYENNE

Reviewer: Dana McGee (rec.models.scale)
Kit Review submitted: 19 May 2005

Kit Details:

Kit: Legato AH-56 Cheyenne #72066
Price: 32.65 from Squadron Hobby
Rating: Good

Aircraft History:

The Lockheed AH-56A was designed to meet the U.S. Army's requirement for the Advance Aerial Fire Support System (AAFSS). Lockheed rolled-out the first prototype on May 3, 1967. The rigid-rotor Cheyenne, with a crew of two, featured a XM112 swiveling gunner's station linked to rotating belly and nose turrets, and a laser range-finder tied to a fire control computer. It was armed with an XM52 30mm automatic gun in the belly turret and a XM51 40mm grenade launcher or an XM53 7.62mm Gatling machine gun in the chin-turret, TOW's, and XM200 rocket launchers.

Ten prototypes were completed before the program was terminated August 9, 1972 due to delayed development, rising costs, and the appearance of two competitive company-funded initiatives by Sikorsky and Bell. The Army wanted a smaller, more agile Advanced Attack Helicopter (AAH) with a less complicated fire control and navigation system. The helicopter's mission would eventually be assumed by the Boeing (formerly McDonnell Douglas) AH-64 Series Apache attack helicopter. The Cheyenne had a single rigid four-bladed main rotor and anti-torque tail rotor, and a three-bladed pusher. The Cheyenne was powered by one General Electric T64-GE-16 3435 shp turbine engine. The AH-56A had a speed of 246 mph (214 knots).

The Kit:

SEE INBOX REVIEW FOR WHAT’S IN THE BOX!

Building the Kit:

There are a number of discrepancies. The Intakes are completely wrong in shape, causing the whole upper engine housing to be wrong also. This would take major surgery to fix. The fuselage halves do not fit together that well, I started with the top lining up the halves adding spots of super glue until it was complete, then the bottom rear and nose. This gives you a slightly twisted fuselage, with a seam that’s mismatched by 1/8 inch. I then added 7 “C” clamps from top to bottom and along the sides. This brought the belly together and corrected the twist giving a nicely aligned structure, needing considerable putty to fill in, as the fuselage edges have a nice roll to them. The sponsons don’t fit very well and both have different shapes. Fitting them to the fuselage is a bit of work and allot of filling and sanding, especially since they sit so close to major detail areas, these are an intake and an exhaust housing along. The problem with these is after checking with pics of the real one they appear to reversed as to which side of the fuselage they belong. (pics show these to be correct, but only for the later versions, the kit does have a scoop for the early version unfortunately it is the wrong shape. A test fit of the canopy (after removal from it base) shows it to fit nicely, but its too flat at the back angle, this is the way its molded and will need to have new rear windows made (more on this later). The window tracks molded into the fuselage are also way oversize. These will need to be removed and new smaller ones made. The upper pic shows the exhaust sugar scoop in place, the version I am building that has this will also need new long span wings (After looking at a number of pics the wings all seem to be the same size, just looks different from certain angles). The fit of this part is very bad and needs considerable work to fit. Also the putty you see along the right engine cowling is caused by a mismatch of the two sides of the fuselage. The right side is molded lower than the left.

I made a mistake with the cockpit placement, which showed up later as I set it too far back. The rear bulkhead should be flush with the aft cockpit opening. This caused me considerable work to repair requiring a new aft bulkhead and removing all seat mounts and making new ones. (This was the first time it almost ended up in the trash can.) I can’t stress enough getting all the pics and info you can find as the instructions are almost useless in building the kit.

Moving on, after finishing the sanding, I added both horizontal and vertical stabs to the tail, These just needed a bit of cleaning and alight filing to fit, like everything else there are no alignment marks so a good eye and pictures will help.

I now set the fuselage aside to work on the main rotor, this turned out to be a major headache. The rotor assembly consists of four resin blades, one piece of PE for the rotor head and eight pieces of PE for the blade grips. None of this is strong enough to support the weight of the resin blades. I overcame this by using a sheet of 20 thousands plastic. (see pic) Using liquid glue I softened the plastic then pressed the PE rotor head into it, brushing super glue over the whole until the PE was embedded into the plastic. I then let it set up for 48 hours, re-brushing with liquid glue until the PE part was clean and all the detail showed through. Using a # 11 blade I cut around the PE part and filed it clean, this created a very strong new rotor head.

Now the blades were super glued to it along with the eight blade grips preventing the blades from moving up and down. The mast and control arm assembly were all made from plastic sprue as the kit parts either broke while trying to remove them or were so badly molded as to be unusable. (the mast parts were just lumps) The mast is made up of two pieces of sprue above and below the rotor assembly, All were drilled through and a pin super glued through for alignment and strength. (Make sure the pin sticks out above and below the mast as the top will hold the control arms while below this will help to align the rotor to the fuselage) The four control arms were added last and the entire assembly painted flat black with silver details. PE control arms are provided, but I decided not to use them, as they are very weak and hard to handle. (besides two of them flew away while trying to get them in place).

On to landing gear, the struts need quite a bit of cleaning as they have a lot of flash on them. The kit comes with a set of PE scissors that look nice, but I decided to just clean up the molded in ones as this gives it a bit extra strength. The gear legs don’t have any good way to mount them to the sponsoons so I just super glued them in them in with a bit of extra glue. Doors are all PE and are difficult to deal with being small with no real mounting points; the forward door is just a bit of PE that you have to bend into shape. I used them but these should be more rounded and would look better made from scratch. The instructions (they actually give a good detail drawing of the gear assembly) show a retracting arm, but none is supplied, so I just made one from a piece of stretched sprue. No wheel well detail is provided and I chose not to bother. The supplied tires are useless being badly molded and extremely wide. (the mains measure out to just over three feet, while the tail wheel comes in at about two feet) I found some better ones in the spares box. There are two resin pieces the fit inside the aft wheel well, but couldn’t find any clue as to what they were, so were left off. (I think they are supposed to represent detail somehow). The entire gear and well is painted the same color as the aircraft unless you are building one of the destruction test vehicles and these had white gear and wells.

Now lets move on to the cockpit. A decent amount of detail is provided, with good-looking seats and control sticks along with separate rudder pedals. No side consoles are provided though, and only film instrument panels. The aft seat was molded a bit short on one side making the seat base taper to one side. PE five point harnesses are provided, but once bent into position don’t fit. I went the easy route and fitted two crewmembers in. Ignoring the film instruments (they don’t fit well anyway) I used instrument decals from a Hasegawa OV-10 kit. These fit the panels and look rather convincing. The interior was painted medium gray with black Panel covers, while the seat cushions were done in medium green, PE pieces are supplied for the armor seat panels, but these are way to small and were replaced with new ones made of decal paper. I chose to leave out the rudder pedals as they can’t be seen and due to the mistake in cockpit placement the aft panel and shroud had to overlap the step in the floor leaving no room for them as the aft seat now sat close to the step. No weapons sights are given, I was going to add one in the gunner’s station, but forgot when I added the canopy.

Now for the Tail Rotor, This consists of two PE parts for the hub and four resin blades. Again this is a weak component, I added a small plastic sprue bearing between the two PE parts and drilled this to give me someway to fasten it to the tail rotor shaft. Attaching the blades the small PE hub is an exercise in frustration. As once you get them fastened to one side the whole wants to flex everywhere. I made a small jig to hold it, but it’s still hard to get aligned properly. Once together it proved to be quite strong though. Decals are given for the blade tips and work well even the white covering the black blades completely. Depending on which version you want a red inner band will be needed at the base of the blade to hub.

The pusher prop is one piece (this would have been nice with the tail rotor) but the blades are not molded well and are very thick. This part requires a considerable amount of cleanup and thinning of the blades. The hub has a taper from back to front that makes it a bit unrealistic. A piece of PE is given to add the center fan detail, though it’s a bit too big for the hub and requires trimming to fit. The entire prop is painted black with yellow tips.

Final Assembly:

After taping off the interior, the fuselage was primed and any last minute filling and sanding was done. Then the large underbelly gun housing was added and the forward turret gun was installed. This requires a centerpiece to be installed with barrel supposedly to allow you to fit the gun in different positions, it won’t work, only fits one way. Then the wings were re-installed (as they were cut off during the assembly of the sponsons) The right side retractable step was installed, this consists of two PE side plates and three PE steps. The aft portion of the right sponson must be cut off and an included resin filler piece is fitted. (I didn’t use the three steps; instead making new ones out of stretched sprue to give it more strength) The step hangs down slightly toed in. The kit comes with a second different style step for the left side; I didn’t use it, as I couldn’t find any photo references of its position.

No exhaust pipe or black out panel is included so I made one from an old Matchbox Torpedo drilling out the inside to thin it to scale. Cutting off the tapered back and using that to create a spike to give it some depth. This was fitted after the helicopter was painted and decaled.

Painting and Decals:

Painting was easy as it’s overall Olive Drab. No fancy matching or struggling for the color I just used Krylon’s Camouflage System Olive Drab #8143. This is a real good match for 60’s and 70’s and early 80’s U.S. Army aircraft. (I know because we used it on our Mohawks and Huey's when we couldn’t get military stock) It also brushes well for small touchups. The yellow warning stripe was painted on with a mix of yellow with a touch of red to give it the proper shade. This was also used on the Pusher Prop tips.

The kit decals go on well with excellent register. I applied the decals with a light coat of Microsol, once dry then a light coating of Super Sol was applied to set them. They went on well over even the deeper panel lines with no silvering. I used some extra stenciling from a set off an Italeri F-15E, These needed Supersol right off the get go and still had a problem setting in. This is also were the yellow exhaust outlet decal came from. I had to replace the red and white stripe on the engine-cowling spine as I accidentally used Super Sol first and the kit decal melted as soon as it touched it.

The canopy was in installed last (after being dipped twice in Future) using super glue along the sides to tack it down as the canopy is extremely thin and a bit twisted. Then all seams were filled with Testors clear parts cement. With the Testors to fill it in and repainting the shape of the rear window it turned out not to bad, as long as you don’t look too close. The final step was adding the antennas, the towel rack behind the cockpit was made from a thin piece of vacuform painted and bent to shape along with the lower aft antenna which I made from a piece of the resin sheeting.

Recommendations:

Recommendations: Over all I enjoy having it my collection, but I wouldn’t want to build it again. I recommend it to those with a lot of experience in scratch building and some resin experience. But if you just need one in your collection, then by all means. It’s not an overnight project. It took me over a month. If it weren’t for this review it would probably be sitting on the back of my desk.

I got lucky and only paid half the asking price for it from Squadron Hobby, I notice that it’s not even listed in their catalog or web page.

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