It's not often I get the urge to build a hysterical palm tree, but this one looked so interesting that I just had to break down and get it. The Mi-3 was an obscure variant of the Mi-1 with a 4 blade main rotor and a slightly larger main rotor shaft housing. Two stretcher paniers were carried on the sides of the fuselage. It was developed from the Mi-1 in the mid 1950s, and did not appear to be used widely.

Amodel's kit is typical of their small limited-run kits. There are several sprues of off-white plastic, and two of clear. There is a moderate amount of flash which will need cleaning up before assembly can commence, and quite a lot of mould release grease to wash off. There appears to be only one decal option, for a Soviet Army helicopter in olive green over light blue, with white topped stretcher paniers. The decal sheet is a duplicate of the one apparently offered in the very similar Mi-1 Ambulance kit, which includes an Aeroflot machine as well as two different military options. Given that I like to do civillian markings where possible, I may do a fictional Aeroflot Mi-3 using the markings provided. Hey, you never know.

Here's what you get in the box. First, the box with quite a nice painting of the subject in a wintry scene:


The plastic sprues in all their glory:


The clear sprues. They're reasonably clear, but will still benefit from a dip in Future:


Since I know nothing about this aircraft beyond the short history printed on the instruction sheet, I am unconstrained by the bounds of research and the never-ending quest for accuracy. I'm just going to have fun with it

Construction begins with the interior. I had to do a lot of cleaning up to get this far. Amodel kits need TLC to yield a good result. Every edge needs sharpening up to clean off the flash and greeblies left behind by the moulding process. The cyclic and collective sticks needed very careful cleaning to rid them of a lot of flash without breaking them. I had the same difficulty with the anti-torque pedals, plus I had to carve away much of the bottom of the cockpit floor so they could be glued in while still sticking up enough for the pilot to be able to put his feet on them.


The top of the rear bulkhead forms the intake grill at the front of the rotor shaft housing, which is why I left it unpainted for the time being.

The pilot's seat looked a lot like a fighter's seat, complete with a recess for a seat parachute. Since I'm sure that Soviet helicopter pilots did not use parachutes, I made a little seat cushion out of miliput. I over-exagerated the upholstry buttons so they'd be visible through the coke-bottle thick windows.


The seat cushions will get a generic canvas colour just to add a little interest to the interior.

A little more work done.

The interior has its final colours


I did a bit of a wash to pop out the buttons on the pilot's seat cushions


I wasn't sure whether it will be a tail sitter, so I glued in some lead shot just to make sure.


It's all closed up now


And seems to be happy about the prospect.


Now on to filling all the seams.

A little more work. There are 2 strange shapes that glue to the side of the helicopter and help to hold the stretcher paniers. I'm not sure what they were for. Perhaps a medic could reach through them to attend to the patients? Whatever their function, they're supposed to be constructed from 2 halves. My kit only had 2 of the 4 halves, luckily one for each side. I've sculpted replacement halves from Miliput.



They'll get cleaned up and shaped more exactly once the Miliput sets.

The main rotor is taking shape. I'll need to scratchbuild the control pushrods once the rotor blades dry. The blades are very fragile. I snapped 2 almost in half when I was bending the droop in, and I had to set them aside to set once I glued them back together.

Looks like you're taming this beast so far. Amodel doesn't know who they're up against!
I bet your "hysterical palm tree" will be the best!
and are you saving something this good for the Support Aircraft campaign in March?
Thanks for posting,
-Sean

I have an Ozmods Caribou and Amodel Buffalo in 1/144 that are either for that one or the 1/144 scale campaign. Perhaps I'll do one for each? Or maybe I'll do an Albatross instead. I've got some spiffy RCAF decals for each of them from CanMilAir so I won't have to use the kit schemes.

Now I have the urge to get Paul McCartney to sing Mil on wheels





Getting the struts off the sprues was a real bother. 6 of the 7 legs snapped when I was cutting them from the sprue joins, most of which were larger in diameter than the strut. In addition, one of the struts had been short-shot so I had to replace it with a length of plastic rod. Cleaning off the flash was another troublesome task. I guess I should be hapy that Amodel's plastic is so soft; gluing the legs back together was made much easier.

I left the lids of the stretcher paniers white inside, reasoning that the patient would be less prone to claustrophobia in a white enclosure. The bottoms were painted grey and then glued to the tops. The entire circumference of the seam had to be sanded down. The Miliput stretcher pannier holder thingys were sanded down and glued in place. They cover up much of the area of the rear windows. From the boxtop illustration, I gather that there was only a sliver of window in this version. The missing halves seem to have had a slightly different shape than the ones I had to work from, and as a result there was a huge gap between the holders and the paniers. I used gap-filling superglue to fill it.

The lower nose bowl window did not fit very well, so I was sanding the edges when it decided to jump out of my fingers and fly off into the lair of the carpet monster. I cut a piece of clear thermoforming acetate, heated it and bent it to shape over the nose. I laid a piece of masking tape over the window cutout, traced it, then cut the tape to shape and placed it on the formed acetate. Later on I'll cut out the window shape and glue it in place.

Nice!
...and don't worry, right after you finish fashioning the new lower window and blend it completely, you'll find the original piece. It never fails!
Thanks for posting.
-Sean H.

I've been dreading that sad little *crunch* that tells me my foot found it...

I found this picture of a Hungarian Mi-1 ambulance showing that one can see right through the panier and into the helicopter, thus proving my supposition that an attendant would have access while in flight. This is a far superior setup to similar paniers US forces used on S-51s during the Korean War. I also note that my guess of a white interior has also proved correct.

I've got most of the fiddly bits attached now. When I was working on replacing the nose windows, the replacement part flew out of my hand, and landed right beside the missing original part! I quickly snapped it up and glued it in place. I'm not about to look a gift part in the mouth

The main rotor is balancing in place for these photos, just to give an idea of the final shape.





Left to install are the landing light, pitot tube, doors, stretcher panier transparencies and rotors. The steps under each door look like a U shape in the box top painting, yet the parts I'm supposed to glue in place look more like an upside down π instead. I'll make wire replacements and glue them in place after painting.

Colour has happened! I've got the first draft of the colour scheme on the airframe now, and all of a sudden it doesn't look as horrible as it did the other day. Okay, it looks horrible in a different way, but at least it's different.





I have a lot of touching up to do, likely involving anything up to a total repaint...

I think you will find that those strange things between the cabin and panniers are ducts to get some warm air into the panniers. Don't want the patient freezing to death in-transit now do we..

Good progress by the way...

Finished!

Wow! Well done. . It was worth the month-long wait.
Thanks for posting,
-Sean H.