Hasegawa's 1/200 scale
AC-130 "Spectre"

by Patrick Hawkey

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The 1/144 scale Hasagawa AC-130 Hercules kit (now out of production) is quite nice, but with many pieces and inserts for various versions kitted, a little tedious to build. This is the Spectre gunship version.

Separating the propellers from the sprues without breaking any blades is a particular challenge.

Clear parts in any scale can be hard to be made to look realistic, so I wasn't about to try to mask off all the tiny rectangles that made up this model's windscreen. Instead, I took the windscreen from an Italeri 1/48 scale Hercules, covered it with masking tape, and pencilled the individual windows on to the tape. I then removed the tape, laid it flat, darkened the drawn windows with ink, and scanned it. I shrunk that image to 1/200th scale then printed it on to clear decal film. That decal wrapped pretty easily around the front end of the model. Ideally the windows would be gloss black, but re-touching them with Future or paint was beyond my capability.

One has to know where to draw the line!

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Model, Images and Text Copyright © 2004 by Patrick Hawkey
Page Created 23 July, 2004
Last Updated 24 July, 2004

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