Tower action II

Railings for the crew

To keep my boat's crew from falling into the sea too easily, the vessel required some railings. One set was installed to the base of the conning tower, while another was installed to the top.

While I was working on these, I noticed that the tower's connection to the hull on the left side of the U-Boat wasn't as pretty as they were on the right side. Therefore I slapped unhealthy amounts of (Tamiya) putty to hopefully remedy the situation. The next afternoon I filed/sanded the excesses off with some success, I would like to believe. Maybe I have to return to some sections, if they didn't end up as fine as the engineers demanded.

A scale demo

My photos may not deliver the immense size of the U-Boat, not even with the help of an earlier comparison shot. So I hired Hans from the Deutsche Afrika Korps to pose a bit.

That may not be enough. So I decided to offer a helping hand for those interested:

Back to the business as usual

I wasn't missing much anymore so I proceeded on to the missing parts of the conning tower. With their support blocks I installed four antennae, one of which I actually lost for a few hours but found later before I got to make a new one out of streched sprue. After this I drilled three holes into the planks and attached the rope-holding rods into them.

Setting the cables is going to wreck my poor nerves

The photoetch subset

Apparently my sprues were missing the torpedo hulls, so I didn't get / have to work on the tiny propeller blades. One of those other pieces was to be bent a bit and glued to the rear of the ship. Another one had to be bent into an U-shape and glued onto the snorkel device. There was supposed to be another pe-setup, a cylinder wrapped around a plastic cylinder - but for some reason my kit missed the whole D sprue and therefore the aforementioned cylinder as well. I'll survive.

Waiting for the painting to begin

As I'm writing this the sub is waiting for me to start priming. My assumption is that in the best case that will be done in two sessions and hopefully no more than that. But that depends on if I have ample time and if I notice any missing spots while I'm working or not.

The real paintjob is going to take many more sessions, especially as the lower hull alone will require two, the upper hull may go in one, and the conning tower needs the white stripes as the first layer before the first light gray layer. And following the noblest of Project Mumblings traditions I'm not going to use those decal stripes provided by the kit.

I guess that the safest assumption is that getting the actual paintjob done is going to take a good work-weekful of hobby time. Maybe even more, but that depends on how much time I have available, as setting up the airbrush, painting even a tiny bit and then cleaning up is a much slower process than it sounds like.