AH-64A Apache

[Ralph_S]

In the last months I've mainly been building minifig scale things and a few larger cars. Now I felt it was time for a new 1/36 scale helicopter.

It's been a long time since I last had an AH-64 in my collection of aircraft. Judging from the numbers of Apaches on brickshelf and MOCpages, it's a very popular helicopter to build. However, I never got around to building a new one mainly because of a colour issue. The real helicopters are dark olive drab and the closest colour LEGO has to that and in which they've made a large enough palette of colours is (old) dark grey. I used to build US Army helicopters in black simply because by the time more suitable colours such as old dark grey started showing up in stores, I had stopped buying LEGO. Now, fast forward about ten years, and just as I had started buying LEGO again, LEGO replaces its greys with bley.

Still, I wanted an Apache in old dark grey. I've collected much of the dark grey I did have and put in a few bricklink orders and here it finally is:

more photographs.

Cheers,

Ralph

[Wouwie]

Holy *bleeeep*!

That's amazing! It's so...detailed!

Gimme that! Or the instructions

[Guss]

excellent! nice design, and colour ^^ makes me wants to try to pilot it !

[Ralph_S]

I'm quite happy with how the colour turned out. I didn't realise quite how brown old grey is until I built this.

Cheers,

Ralph

[zero1312]

WOW, that's very........... brickbuild.

[Ralph_S]

WOW, that's very........... brickbuild.

What do you mean by that?

Cheers,

Ralph

[Skorpius47]

You built this in the older style of LEGO building. Nowadays, everyone is going ape-shit for smooth edges, "SNOT", tiles, and what have you. This model proves those newer techniques aren't always the best. You've shown one can take the original ways of LEGO building and still make impressive models.

Kudos.

[Aliencat]

You built this in the older style of LEGO building. Nowadays, everyone is going ape-shit for smooth edges, "SNOT", tiles, and what have you. This model proves those newer techniques aren't always the best. You've shown one can take the original ways of LEGO building and still make impressive models.

Kudos.

Agreed. This has SNOT techniques only in the right places. Excellent job Ralph!

[Ralph_S]

You built this in the older style of LEGO building. Nowadays, everyone is going ape-shit for smooth edges, "SNOT", tiles, and what have you. This model proves those newer techniques aren't always the best. You've shown one can take the original ways of LEGO building and still make impressive models.

Kudos.

Agreed. This has SNOT techniques only in the right places. Excellent job Ralph!

Thanks to both of you.

I've seen plenty of builds that were studless but that nonetheless completely failed to impress me. Of course, I do a bit of SNOT building here and there (the tail and the nose-mounted sensors are examples here), but not for the sake of it or in order to do away with studs. I don't care about studs showing and never have. I've been criticised for showing studs and there are people who seem to think that if it isn't SNOT, it's no good, so for me it is good to see that there are still quite a few people who can appreciate that there are other ways of doing things and that the result isn't necessarily inferior.

Cheers,

Ralph