Reviews of famous planes often start with something like: "unless you've been living under a rock your whole modeling life, you'll have heard of the F-4 Phantom, P-51 Mustang, Supermarine Spitfire, etc".

Well, the same must be true of the legendary Lockheed C-130 Hercules. How could anyone vaguely interested in aeroplanes not know the basics about the Herk?

It's been hauling people and stuff all around the world for more than 50 years in just about every western (and many non-western) air force and plenty of cargo companies to boot.

I wrote a pretty gushing review of the awesome Hercules in my review  of Hasegawa's excellent little 1/200 kit. If you're interested (or, by some miracle, you did spend your modeling life under a rock), you can check it out right here on MM.

If you can't be bothered with that but still want to know a little more, here's the top three fast facts:
 
. coolest place ever landed by a C-130: equal tie between the South Pole and USS Forrestal . wackiest mission ever flown: flying into the middle of a hurricane. I mean, really?! Most bad-ass Herk (and it ain't the gunship): MC-130 Combat Talon. Terrain following radar and great code names like Eagle Claw and Urgent Fury. Hoo-rah!

This is an oldie but a goodie.

Mine was moulded in white plastic and sadly had a warped wing. Apart from that, it's a good little kit for the most part, despite its age. A mix of lightly raised and engraved detail greets you when you open the box.  The rear door, in two parts, could be positioned open or closed, but there is no internal detail. The cockpit doesn't have any either, which on any other C-130 would be a let down but on this one won't be noticed because the cockpit transparency is so thick. It has the copyright date moulded underneath the tailplane.

Smaller details are pretty basic - wheels are nothing special, and neither are the propellers. All are good enough, though.

You need some noseweight and black paint in the front part of the fuselage, but unless you plan to position the rear door open, you can quickly join up the fuselage and get onto the wings. Mine was warped. I squashed it down a bit after heating it in hot water and most of the warp seemed to disappear though you'll see in the pictures that there is still a bit of bend.

The least satisfactory part of building this thing is smoothing out the area where the wings join the fuselage top. Sanding and putty is the only way around it.  The propellers are a bit lame, too, and need some effort to get them to sit properly.

Getting the undercarriage on can be done after painting. My main wheel well doors are MIA. Apart from that, this is a very simple kit to assemble.

I really like the old high-visibility schemes on C-130s. When I built this, I had an article ripped out of a 1992 Fine Scale Modeller (I forget which month, and I don't have the article any more), which had side and top profiles of various old USAF high-visibility schemes. Some of them were used by C-130s that supported Arctic/Antarctic operations.

I used Tamiya AS-12 from a spray can for the aluminium sections, a Testors day-glo orange for the nose and the extreme wingtips, and Humbrol bright red for the larger red areas on the wings and tail. The nose and propeller spinners were matt black (Tamiya) and the propeller blades are a light grey (also Tamiya).

Markings came from the spares box. The majority of them were actually from my Revell 1/144 E-3 kit (I built that in the NATO scheme, so I didn't need the USAF decals). I used a generic tail number, which reflected the 5-digit numbers used in the FSM profile.

In that sense, my model is a generic representation, not a specific example. Not to everyone's taste, but fine by me. I just like the Hercules and I like this scheme.

The Minicraft 1/144 C-130 is probably a lot better. It's also probably considerably more expensive. If you just want a Hercules in a manageable scale, but you think the excellent Hasegawa 1/200 is too small, then go for this one. With a fraction of effort you can get a decent result.

Three Cheers for Wikipedia.

March 2010