Phil

Your doing a great job. As a partwork its coming close to an end but hope all your updates continue to go well.

Have you thought about any sound effects for the build? I have found a company that sells a sounds effect for the u boat while tracking down something for my occre build.

Haveca look at the following if youvare interested. You have to scan to the end ofvthe list for the u boat. Rather like the galleon sound effects with canon fire ms50 is the sound module.

http://www.modelsounds.co.uk/sounds.html#trains

Hi Tony,

I've just been on link you posted. Fantastic! Woop woop!

I will definitely be contacting those guys at some point in the near future.

Regards,
Phil

Thanks Dave for your encouraging comments.

The sound will come later in the build, but hopefully it will add that little bit of atmosphere and make the boat come alive.

It's amazing what these companies do nowadays with sound.

More posts to follow soon.

Regards,
Phil.

Thank you for the kind comments Alan. It's not everyone's cup of tea; building a U-Boat, but I'm glad you're enjoying the build.

Regards,
Phil W.

Good evening from 'The Dockyard'.

On this part of the build I will be focusing on the midships free flood holes.

See attached photo of these on U995.

As can be seen, these vents /holes are arranged with equal spacing on the U995. This was not the case on all Type VIIC U-boats. The model i'm building, U230, had it's vents arranged in pairs with a singular vent hole at the aft end of the pattern.

My initial plan was to blank off the last 3 vents on the supplied plastic part and drill through the rest to open them out, similar to what I've done before, to give that feeling of depth.

My drilling didn't go to well if i'm honest. The drill veered off many times resulting in a very uneven and 'scruffy' look. Some vents looked larger than others, while some appeared shorter or longer and in one case I had two that were nearly joined to make a very large vent. Not what I was after at all!

So it remained in this 'state' for many months while I continued with the rest of the superstructure, but it was always an eye sore whenever I stood back to admire the other work I had completed.

As the build progressed I found myself back at these vents with decisions to make! My idea was to fill all the vents with clay. Which is what I did and let it harden overnight. With this in mind I then proceeded to re-drill out all of the vents. This didn't go to well either as the clay wasn't as robust as the plastic and so the drill kept veering off into the clay when I came to widen a couple of the vents. Then the clay broke off in clumps.

Another shot of this disaster.

As a side note, we're looking at the starboard side, bow to the right of the photo.

One more photo of what I was left with following 'claygate'.

The attached photo shows the pattern drilled out.

Another photo showing my earlier attempts.

I'm thankful I have plenty of patience and sometimes modelling definitely tests this 'virtue' as i'm sure anyone would agree reading this.

With a sigh and a deep breath I took to it with a needle file and painstakingly clawed back my errors and produced something reasonably satisfactory.

Now for the next part of the 'drama' , I noticed that to fit my templates correctly I would have to open out my 'claygate' a little wider so that it 'hid' behind my new version. In doing so I realised that for this to work properly I would be better off grinding out all of the original vents to make one massive hole.

See attached photo.