Lockheed C-130H-30 Hercules
Royal Dutch AF


C-130H-30 model in 1/72 scale
kit review
modelling report

The Lockheed Hercules is the transport workhouse of air forces. The C-130H-30 was a modernized version with a longer fuselage. Also the Royal Netherlands Air Force uses a few Herky birds.

The model depicts such a Hercules in use today.

The best 1/72 kit to start with is from Italeri. It is very good , but has one big error: the lack of the loading floor kink in the fuselage cross-section. This can be corrected by adding a strip outside at the floor and filling with putty. (note: a similar excercise in the larger 1/48 can be done by using the 1/48 Italeri kit!)

The next best kit is that old one of Airfix.
All kit's fuselages need to lengthened however. 

The Italeri kit # 0139 was used here. 

 

 
(1) You need to lengthen it 35 mm in front and 28 mm aft of the wing to get a C-130-H30.

So the kit needed a fuselage extension of the standard fuselage, so I used old Airfix kit parts as "plugs" to extend the Italeri fuselage. The use of loads of putty was needed to get a nice finish to hide everything. 

The cockpit was cut-off and detailed prior to glueing the parts together.
..


(2) I added the missing and visible  "kink" at the floor location on the outside of the C-130 fuselage. This was done with a long plastic strip and putty (*I forgot to make photos).


(3) The C-130H-30 has a special cooling fairing and intake at the uc.fairing.

(4) The undercarriage fairings need to be lengthened also with APU. The crew access hatch is a nice touch to add.

(5) The beaver tail is made with also the nacelles being detailed. 

NOTE: LATER ON I FOUND OUT THAT THE KIT NACELLES ARE ABOUT 4 MM too Short. Resin sets can be found for improvement..
   . 

 
The named aircraft with nose u.c.

And there she is....


The 1/72 model is finished in RNLAF colors of FS 26375 and FS 26118 with walkways and with the excellent Dutch decals set #72025. Enamel paints were used.
 
The model when completed got a base semi-matt varnish coat with the airbrush.
 

REFERENCES

C-130H-30, Modelbouw in Plastic, IPMS Nederland, 1996-4, by Meindert de Vreeze and Bas Damen (in Dutch)

INTERNET:

My own C-130 KLu Walk around...

IPMS Nederland C-130 KLu info pages....

IPMS Nederland C-130 Walk around
 

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Created this page December 7, 2000