Opening the limber holes and other free flooding areas
Using my ancient Dremel, with a new cable attachment. The old one had rusted and snapped a couple of years ago. I'm not sure what I am going to do with the diesel exhaust port shown in the first photo, between and above the two lines of open holes.
There are, at least, 4 types of exhaust ports used on VIICs, and I am having serious trouble finding any photographs of any VIIC/41s from the batch to which my subject (U-297) belongs, let alone of the boat itself.
Didn't want to use the dremel on the aft holes. I was afraid to thin this area out too much, so chose to drill and file the holes instead. I have no pin vise, so I used a trick learned while reading Siara's build thread. An X-acto knife works very well with a small enough drill bit. 1/32" in this case.
Still have a little cleaning up to do, as the first pic shows. Can't seem to locate my needle files. Probably still packed in a box somewhere. Don't want to just start scraping with the x-acto knife.
I'm not sure what to do with these areas yet. The aft floods are the wrong shape/size/locations. Any grinding there will make it terribly fragile.
The bow floods should be oval shaped, and the saddle tank flood vents need to be opened and grates fashioned from stretched sprue. Each piece as thin as a human hair. That should be ALOT of fun.
The drainage area above the saddle tanks (the dark, horizontal line in the above photo) needs to be opened up and supports glued in place. More on that later.
Enough for now. Today I will order the only photo-etch set I could find for VIIC in 1/144 scale. Hopefully I'll be done with modifications on the hull by the time it arrives.
LINK TO MY BUILD PICS