…with “Nautilus Models” PE and resin deck guns. Thus far, things are simple enough, aside from the PE instruction sheet…very little help and a little cornfusing!
The kit includes a full pressure hull with interior bulkheads, to be all closed up inside[:S]. Unless you’re doing a cutaway and a ton of interior scratchwork, it’s a waiste of time!
I ended up cutting off all that would not be visible through all the little holes, and to provide access to install bolts through the hull.
The upper hull is solid, so I cut a pair of holes to feed the bolts through. I also painted the interior area black. The bolts are CAed into place, to hold them till she’s mounted on a plaque.
The holes will not be visible, once the deck is in place.
Dryfitting reveales a not so good fit at the step. Will require some filling and a fare amount of sanding.
Finally got a bit of bench time!!! Put in over 60 hours at work this past week…SUCK!!!
Anyway, the hull and deck are now one solid piece. Took a lot of grinding and sanding to smooth things out.
The PE set has rails for the tower, but they just didn’t look right, and the size was off. I used the kit “uprights” and stretched sprue to simulate the heavy gauge wire rails. I also added the door up front (sheet styrene).
Hopefully, I’ll get a rain day or two this week, so I can get more bench time!
The side openings into the fairwater are normally open to the sea that’s also where some of the air get’s to the Main Induction although some boats have the aft end of the fairwater perferated IIRC there is also some storage in there, only museum boats have doors to keep the public out, Balao’s have one opening on the front port side where an escape trunk is located, the forward escape trunk (forward torpedo room) is accessed through the hatch on the forward deck of through the rectangular opening in the deck next to the hatch that leads to the side hatch of the trunk.
The door on the front of the fairwater is correct.
If you are interested here is a link to the operating manual for a Fleet Type Submarine, there are also additional System manuals here.
If you care to look at images of any particular boat you may find them at NavSource.
A few years ago I think on another forum someone posted pictures of the USS Silversides showing inside the openings.
You could see the aft end of the con tower cylinder and the aft wall was a perforated partition blocking off access to the main induction, there where a few steps down to decking over the main hull.
What’s interesting is the con tower cylinders, some boats had convex ends where others had concave, the concave version kinda seems like a bad idea because of the water pressure.
Finally got a rain day, with nothing to do but build (mostly).
I made the deck rails with stretched sprue…took FOREVER!!!
Painted with MM enamels, also took forever. After a few minutes, the compressor would heat up and start squirting water. So, I could only spray for a few minutes at a time. Thanks to my swift, catlike reflexes, the trigger was off before any paint got on top of the water. No blemishes!
