Pavla 1/72 Robinson R22 Kit First Look

By Michael Benolkin

First Look

Pavla has released another version of their Robinson R22 helicopter in 1/72nd scale. As with their aftermarket detail sets, the resin castings and vacuformed cabin enclosure are beautifully done. The kit consists of a small array of resin parts, two complete vacuformed enclosures, and one fret of photo-etched details.

The main part is the cabin interior casting which has its two crew seats integrally molded into place. Mount the engine to the underside rear, mount the tail boom/main rotor mast to the top of the engine housing, and add some resin and photo-etched details around the pod.

The cabin enclosure is clear and with some care will go around the pod. The seam dividing left and right halves coincides with the windscreen frame on the full-scale aircraft.

The main rotor is rendered in resin, the tail rotor in photo-etch, neither of which will be a challenge. The real challenge in this build will be the skids. The skids themselves are resin, but the struts that connect the skids to the pod are photo-etch. In the best example of multimedia construction, you'll be attaching one end of a thin photo-etched strut to resin, the other to vacuformed plastic. While I don't doubt that this combination will be strong enough for display, I wouldn't want to move it about to contests.

The kit provides markings for the following four examples:

• R22, ME-015, Armada de Mexico
• R22, EN-1845, Dominican Republic AF
• R22, OK-FFF, privately owned
• R22, OK-BLT, NISA AIR company

The Mexican Navy markings were slightly out of register on my example.

This is a nice looking kit. I think that I'd substitute brass wire for the photo-etched landing gear struts should I take this project on, otherwise I don't see any serious issues for a more experienced multimedia modeler.

Recommended for experienced multimedia modelers.

My sincere thanks to Pavla Models for this review sample!