1/72nd Revell Gato Wolfpack

[salmon]

I use the fittings kit as it was intended and The 2/56 screw it does not show up horribly. Magnets can be done, I suppose.
Peace,
Tom

[boomerfunker]

Trigger Progress!

Thanks Tom..magnets it shall be.

It has been a long time since I posted any progress updates. Lots of things going on in life and of course like most of us I am spread between several hobbies or projects. Anyhow I've found myself alone with Trigger again lately and have re-kindled our stormy relationship.

I am happy to say the last few weeks have met with success for the most part and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel on this thing now.
The first major redo I tackled was the after deck. It is with great fortune that Silversides, Triggers sister ship still lives on in Michigan as a museum boat. Her stern steel deck is nearly identical to my reference photos of Trigger. So with JeffP's photo collection of that very deck and my reference photos I extrapolated a steel deck layout as a single add on part to cover the incorrect mesh pattern of the kit.




The deck is a from one of those cheap garage sale signs at the Walmart. They are poly-styrene just like Evergreen and you can get a lot of it cheap if it's on sale. The access panels are raised a bit for interest whereas in real life everything is flush, and I also drilled a couple hundred holes to suggest the pattern of same on the real boat.

[boomerfunker]

Trigger Progress II

While carving out the flood holes on the hull bottom I realized the limitations of my work bench once the three hull parts were together. Too small!
Speaking of hull parts I was reminded how difficult rudder or stern planes adjustments are in my tiny Merriman 1/96 Skipjack. I am trying on the idea of making the stern cone removable for ease of access during an imagined repair job in the future. I have it on three brass screws and nuts and will ultimately also "tack" it in place with some dots of superglue. i am still deciding whether the non-prototypical seam where the hull parts meet will be worth it. That decision can wait till final paint...
For the flood holes I used the Nautilus Models vinyl stick-ons which are probably not correct for this boat but rivet counting is taking a seat to speed on this particularly tedious chore. It took a week even so but they are done.
Lastly with the discovery of too little space on my regular bench, I took some time to build this rolling work table out of a speaking podium for the upcoming Portsmouth hole pattern installation. I can now simply roll the table around to get to either side at will and three-thousand lumens of shop lights banish the shadow realm.

[boomerfunker]

Trigger Progress III

Next up was the most pondered and dreaded part of this whole build. How do I take the kit pattern of of a partial single row of "half moon" holes and turn it into the the double and single rows of elongated ovals that is the Portsmouth pattern Trigger had? Aftermarket parts didn't seem to work or weren't forthcoming so a home brew was going to be required. The first step was a good design, so I got very basically familiar with a drawing program from Google called "SketchUp." Long old-dog-learning-new-tricks story short, I had a working pattern which I had printed out on thin styrene sheet by a company called Ponoko. Very nice and PATIENT people.
The parts I made are not sized to the kit to be a drop in replacement as such as that is still beyond by skills but I could make my own composite part of the right size using a template from the kit part and that's what I did. Paul, if you ultimately use these for your boat I have more photos to explain my process more thoroughly, but for here a brief walk through.
I made a template from parts of a second kit I have in my possession as trying to do so from the installed ones proved too fiddly. I made new parts to size of the old featuring a gut piece with my own holes. These holes run parallel to the waterline so I had to first mark that out then another line to indicate where the holes should run. After that is was cutting out kit plastic and installing scratchbuilt parts in their stead. Things turned out pretty close and good enough for me. I did have to apply a little heat gun treatment to get things bent more in line at one spot though.
Bottom line is this part of the build was the biggest hurdle to overcome and now it has been. Yay! Next up is the teak deck and that is going to be fun in a whole nuther way.

[PaulC]

Everything looks great, Tom. She looks like a Mare Island boat! The only problem I see is not enough detail pics to drool over.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]4406[/ATTACH]

Is that a scale water-cooled machine gun on the books in the background?

[jefftytoo]

WOW. Humbled as always. Wish I could work on Harder, but too much else going on as usual. Hearty congrats, my old friend.

Green board,
JeffP

[jefftytoo]

I see that it has been well over a year-and-a-half since I—or anyone—has posted to this thread. A sad state of affairs, indeed, for our once-thriving and much beloved Gato wolfpack—particularly for the skippers of the so-called "Ghosts' Glory" wolfpack especially...founding member/builders of Wahoo, Trigger and Harder, before so many others also joined in the fun.

I've just spent a very fun evening skimming over the 56 prior pages of this thread—thrilling at its builds, laughing at the jokes, finding inspiration in the dedication to quality and super-detailing, and simply reveling in our r/c submarine camaraderie. What a fine group we are, and what a fun hobby this remains—even if this particular group project has admittedly fallen on hard times as life has apparently gotten in everyone's way.

All that said, and with my other submarine projects temporarily put aside, I am hereby making an effort to finally jump back into the Gato fray. We'll see how long I can manage this revived devotion, but for the first time in ages I actually hauled out my Harder build and got to work. It was indeed a humble new beginning, but at least some progress was made, which I shall report here:

My Harder is—or will be—taking something of a hybrid approach. I am using the tried-and-true Merriman conversion/control fittings kit and basic build strategy, though I will be employing the removable top deck access design pioneered by Crazy Ivan and the late, great Big Dave Welch—rather than splitting the hull at the "equator" as Mr. Merriman does. Also, I have one of Big Dave's very last pre-built reverse RCABS cylinders on the shelf standing by to go in the boat, meaning the linkages won't exactly match Mr. Merriman's control design, so these discrepancies will have to eventually be dealt with. Big Dave's tube does resemble Merriman's "snort" design of recent years, however, in that it employs both a high-pressure and low-pressure pump—requiring final-stage air intake from inside the above-the-surface sail to achieve full surface trim.

I mention all the above merely to explain that I will pretty much be following Mr. Merriman's popular Gato build video series step-by-step in getting back to this long-delayed project. Today, for instance, I succeeded in clipping, grinding, filing and sanding out the pin foundations, per David's specific instructions, in the bow and stern pieces as shown in the accompanying photos.




This also included hogging out some material within the stern pieces to permit clevis pivot space for the after dive plane linkage.



I further finished filling in the exterior holes provided as sockets for the prop guards—which I won't be mounting since they weren't used on war patrols. I'd started this process ages ago by first using two-part Miliput epoxy putty, but as you can see by the photo, switched to Evercoat Metal Glaze to finish the job (I think) today.



Next up: replacing sanded-off weld lines on the stern, and mounting anchor well drain holes (PE pieces from an aftermarket set) underneath the bow.

Onward—and it's been a long time coming,
JeffP

[sam reichart]

Jeff- glad to see you've revived the thread, and the build. Looking forward to your posts.

[jefftytoo]

Many thanks, Sam old boy; we’ll see what I can do... ;-)

[jefftytoo]

Forgot to post these two shots last night. This is how I celebrated starting in on this build again, by first gluing these Challenge Coins to the stand to make it official: there's no other boat this build can possibly become now. "Hit 'em again, Harder!"

[jefftytoo]

Been busy with a lot of other stuff, but regardless, have still managed to get back to Harder for a little more progress since my last post.

First, a quick test shot of primer on those stern pieces showed they still needed a bit more Metal Glaze on a few of the prop guard depressions. With another round applied, cured and sanded down, they're looking filled and smooth now.




Next I began to tackle installation of the chain locker hole grid aftermarket PE pieces on the bow. Consulting the reference photos found earlier on this thread, I marked the position with blue tape, then attacked the spot with various blades and cutters, roughly removing material in the correct basic size and shape. Then I went after the openings with files and scraping blades, cleaning them up a bit and trying to produce a lip for the adhesive on at least a few of the edges. Sure, I wound up with some blade skips and scrapes, but they can be filled and/or sanded smooth before final paint. The overall effect, I believe, will be worth the extra effort. Thanks for the encouragement to do so with the photo of a similar installation done on one of your U-boats (earlier in the thread), JeffL. Now I've got to do the other side and thin-CA both the pieces onto the bow parts.







Other responsibilities now call for awhile, but hope to be back to posting in a few days.
JeffP

[jefftytoo]

Have done some further work on Harder since my last post.

First, back to the anchor chain locker hole patterns in the bow. The PE pieces representing same have now been glued on and faired in as best I can; they are far from perfect, but they’re not bad. In many respects the real boats are beat-up looking up close, so some roughness actually adds to the scale look, I believe. This shot shows the pieces in place, the port side having turned out a bit better than the starboard. Following that is a photo of the installed pieces test shot with primer. My biggest problem with this whole part of the build was that I was not careful enough in aligning the PE parts themselves, so they’re not installed exactly back-to-back when the bow hull halves are held together. I’m rationalizing that this is okay since you will only see one side of the boat at a time, and from side angles they look just fine. Rarely, if ever, will the boat be viewed from directly underneath—if held upside down details would too easily fall or be broken off the deck! Regardless, no matter how well or poorly installed, in my view these hole patterns add a real scale presence to the bow, so I’m glad I took the trouble to add them.







Also regarding the bow, research info. provided earlier in this thread showed that the tiny slots or holes beneath the main semi-circular free flood ports (associated with the bow buoyancy tank far forward) varied widely among the boats, depending upon their yard of origin. Happily, the hole pattern supplied as-is on the kit’s bow parts was already nearly correct for Harder—whose number (257) just happened to fall within the range of hulls where this hole arrangement actually applied. All I had to do to make the pattern fully accurate was fill in a few unneeded holes, which I did using tiny drops of sanded-off CA gel. (See photo below.) Voila! Once I opened up the remaining little holes (those meant to be kept) with a tiny drill bit, the bow really started to come alive. For once I got off easy by choosing this particular boat to construct!


(Oops: sorry the forum's doing that "turn iPhone-shot photos sideways" thing again.



Fairly unique to Harder as well (at least I don’t remember seeing these on other boats) were a pair of large, squarish, round-cornered free flood openings over her stern tube nest. These can be seen in the following photos—including one highly overexposed in Photoshop to bring the port side opening out of the shadows. (Thank you again, Paul, for providing the original photo.) The kit’s stern halves did not include these openings, so I did my best to eyeball their creation by slicing and drilling out the basic shape and then finessing with an X-Acto and files. Pretty pleased with how they turned out. (Oops: forgot to take a finished shot of them—please see last photo of the next post for how they turned out.)









While in a cosmetic hole-opening kind of mood, I went ahead and drilled out some other deck vent holes not provided in the kit pieces: a double string of tiny ones climbing her turtleback (clearly visible in Harder photos), and another pattern along its sides where the turtleback fairs into the boat’s upper hull. Pretty happy with how these came out too.




(Sorry this one's so blurry when blown up.)

When originally filling and sanding (and then refilling and sanding still more) the sockets for the discarded prop guards on the stern pieces, I of course couldn’t help but destroy several of Revell’s pretty weld lines on the boat’s after hull. Though I’ve read they’re not really to scale, I still think the original kit weld lines look terrific, and so made an earnest attempt to put back the MIAs. Using the method described by Tom Chalfant way back on page 18 or so of this thread, I did my best to replace the obviously missing lines and then even add a few more which appeared to exist on my closeup photo of Harder’s stern.

Results were mixed; at first I was using the wrong kind of painters’ tape, leaving the lines either too thick or too ragged or both. Some of these I left as “close enough,” others I scraped and/or sanded off and retried with different, better tape: the smooth, thin, vinyl variety. This worked much better, and some of these weld lines came out well. With some good lines and some not so good, the results seem appealing to me in their mixture. Again, the real boats can look pretty beat-up with their weld lines sorta ragged, so, at least for now, I’ve deemed these new lines on Harder’s stern parts “good enough.” The photo below shows some of the lines on one of the stern pieces in question, shot with some test primer. (Just been using basic rattle-can stuff for these purposes.)



Um, I was just told by the forum automation that I've reached my photo memory limit with this post, so shall start a new one below. Please keep reading... JeffP

[jefftytoo]

Since then I’ve also attempted to drill out the double string of small vent holes atop Harder’s stern—essentially eyeballing them—and was not pleased with how they turned out. So I filled them with Evercoat Metal Glaze and tried again, this time using an unneeded piece of PE featuring tiny holes in a regular pattern to use as a drilling template. (See photo.)



Once again, this method and its resulting hole pattern did not turn out—surprisingly imprecise. So I filled them in again and tried a third time, essentially eyeballing the effort once more by using dots made with a fine point Sharpie. Again, a miserably failed effort. I filled and smoothed the holes once more and tried a final effort: this time making an accurate, measured paper drill pattern of tiny target X’s on my Mac, printing them on sticky label paper and also securing said pattern in place with tape prior to my fourth attempt at drilling.



To my dismay the results are still not very good (it’s essentially impossible to keep such tiny holes in an extremely regular pattern when drilling by hand)—but they’re not that bad either, and I’ve resolved I simply can’t get them any better than this on my own. Besides, I found I was already starting to damage the shape of the stern pieces with so much refilling and resanding. The hole pattern obviously suffers mostly when scrutinized up close. From a distance they seem good enough, and I’ve deemed it much better to at least have the suggestion of a hole pattern back there than none at all. These types of deck vents were just so common to the boats; again, in my view, they really add a significant scale presence. This last photo shows them shot with primer: I see now there’s a small hole tucked in there that I somehow missed filling earlier, plus some of the weld lines I added to the stern pieces still need a little additional work to be more consistent with those around them…but they’re getting there. More work to tackle later. But hey, don’t those two big, Harder-specific rounded free flood ports over the stern tubes look good?



Next time, we move on to some basic bow and stern assembly per Mr. Merriman. JeffP

[salmon]

Jeff,
I get a little giddy every time you post something on this sub! It means you are that much closer to running it! Keep up the great work sir!
Peace,
Tom

[jefftytoo]

Bless you, Sir! That means a lot to this ol' air-breathing non-qual. Many thanks! Onward and downward, JeffP