The Olive Grove Pickup (Area 88)

The finished model:

The scene:

Shortly after the destruction of the Desert Carrier, the remains of the Area 88 pack up and head off to the base in Greece to regroup.  While training in a loaner F-5A Freedom Fighter, Shin experiences trouble with the engine and decides to make an emergency landing in a nearby olive grove rather than ditching in the ocean.  After hearing the news, Saki decides to dispatch the base’s largest transport helicopter, the CH-54 Tarhe, to go pick up Shin, with Mickey going along for the ride. Meanwhile, Shin has a nice glass of ice tea and a chat with the olive grower’s beautiful daughter.

Check out the original manga scene from Chapter 054 “Spirits, Twilight, and Men” here:

The story:

Although this is a bit of a lull in the action – a welcome lull after the climax of the massive Desert Carrier battle – it’s actually a bit of an important turning point in the story.  As I mentioned in my post for the 1/72 scale model of the F-5A Freedom Fighter, this is the point in the series where Shin begins to realize that he may, in fact, just be a true mercenary after all.  Up until this point, his mantra has been “I just want to survive to get back to Ryoko, so I’ll do whatever it takes.” However, after his encounter with a Japanese mercenary who’s shot for desertion, he begins to question his own culpability.  As he’s mulling that over, this emergency landing puts him into a situation where he begins to confront the ugly truth.  At first the olive grower’s daughter is suspicious of this pilot who just landed in the family’s grove.  Then, after learning he’s a soldier, they bond over a nice glass of ice tea.  However, when the girl learns that Shin is in fact a mercenary – fighting for money rather than for his country – her demeanour changes drastically.  And Shin, for his part, finds he can’t really disagree or wave it away by saying “I was duped into signing up, and I’m just trying to get home alive.”

In fact, in the narrative, you can pretty much draw a straight line from this point, to his struggle after his discharge, where he hangs out at the airbase of the Patrouille de France and needs to fly a SEPECAT Jaguar as the only way to calm his nerves, frazzled by too much peace and happiness.

So, I felt this was an important scene to include it in my 1/144 Area 88 project. But, c’mon… who am I kidding? It’s not all that hard to get a project on that list.  It basically includes every vehicle from the manga – and who could pass up the opportunity to build an awesome CH-54 Tarhe.

The kits:

• CH-54A ”Tarhe“ by LEM Kits
• F-5E Tiger II by Ace Corporation

The build:

I have to say, this was one of the more difficult builds I’ve done as part of my 1/144 Area 88 project.  There’s a couple of reasons for that.  The first was that I actually believed Enex when they said their Northrop F-5A “pocket fighter” was actually 1/144 scale. It’s probably closer to 1/130 – which makes a HUGE difference at this scale.  So that went out the window pretty quickly and in came an Ace Corporation (rebox of the Revell) 1/144 F-5E that had been relegated to the spares box anyway, and some major surgery ensued.  Mostly I focused on trimming the wings down and reshaping the hourglass undercarriage.  It’s not going to fool any rivet counters, but it looks enough like an F-5A for me.

The real star of the show was the CH-54 Tarhe, of course.  Not an easy kit to get in this scale.  I did have thoughts of modifying a CH-53, because, besides the cockpit cabin, the rest is basically a stick with rotors.  However after I stumbled across the LEM resin kit, I couldn’t go back. It was a bit pricey, more than I usually spend on a small 1/144 kit (about 2-3 times what I spent on the CH-53 from Revell), but, like I said, I really like this little interlude chapter from the manga.  Besides, I built those four SEPECAT Jaguars for half what I spent on that CH-53, so it all balances out in the end, right?

I will say though, spending a lot on a kit does make you want to do your best. The trickiest thing about this kit was cutting out the windows. I had to practice my field surgery skills to drill and cut the windows out of the resin frames, then I had to cut the windows out of the vacu-formed clear cabin. Then I had to glue them all together without getting CA glue all over everything.  I got it done, and I think it looks okay, but it was a bit nervy in spots.

The rest of the build was pretty straightforward – did I mention besides the cabin it’s basically a stick with a rotor? I did have to scratch up some wires for the tail stabiliser, the tail stand and the cabin access ladder, but nothing really exciting.  However, I did have a bit of a challenge with the motor.  First of all, the shaft wasn’t long enough to reach from inside the engine cavity, so I had to add a small bit of polystyrene rod to it to bridge the gap.  Drilling holes in 2 mm rods dead centre is quite tricky to do. No matter how close you think you are, there always seems to be a bit of a wobble. I’m also not quite sure how dead centre the hole in the rotor head is either, so when you add them both together you get a significant wobble.  This is made worse by the fact that I tried to slow the propeller spin quite a bit.  I usually don’t add more resistance to the circuit than is necessary to prevent burn out of the DC motors.  However, this time, since I’m trying to show that the chopper has just landed and is powering down, I wanted the spin quite a bit slower.  I tested it out, but I nearly added too much because once all the blades were glued in place, it had a hard time spinning.  Took a little bit of a nudge to make sure it wasn’t rubbing anywhere, but it worked – of course I also almost soldered the wires backwards and made the props spin in the wrong direction, but I caught the mistake in time.

Anyway, there you go.  I pretty satisfied with the result, but feel free to tell me what you think.