Revell VIIC 1-144 scale by Subguru

[Bill Nichols]

Having watched with awe the amazing job Siara is doing with his 1/72 scale Type VIIC U-boat from Revell, I decided to build one of my own. Unfortunately, I can't afford the room needed for the big boat, so I'm going to build the more manageable 1/144 kit instead.

Here are the pieces as they come out of the box:



I'm always impatient to get an idea of what my projects will look like when finished. Below you see the two hull halves clamped together. The deck is a prototype wooden, laser-cut item produced by Nautilus Models and gratiously provided to me by Siara. In the background you can see another of my unfinished projects, Heller's 1/100 scale HMS Victory.



One of the first things I noticed is that the free-flood holes need to be opened up. The plastic is quite thin behind the holes, as this somewhat blurry photo taken with a strong backlight shows.



Instead of drilling out the holes, I experimented with grinding out the holes from behind. Here's what it looks like:



I'm quite happy with how my experiment turned out:



You can also see in the above pic some of the surface detailing (rivets, weld lines) in the kit. It's well out-of-scale and I'm going to have to do something about it before I'm done.

More to follow...