--Originally posted 1/6/10--

With the ending of the year, I made a beginning on the sail. Presenting the chance to utilize a boneyard piece - ironically, precisely as designed - though its creators were no doubt completely unaware of it! I'll explain:


Click on Image to Enlarge The olive-green sub-assembly in the pics at left - roughly approximating the height width and, most crucially the teardrop footprint of the "boat-hat" top needed for the sail - was itself represented to be the sail of a toy u-boat model ("U-55", at right) which I once bought by mistake. (Or actually, I was duped outright by inscrutable Japanese text, alongside some decent box art of a TypeVII u-boat - however the contents, discovered inside, were exactly as depicted in the instructions above!) Simple as the kit was, many of its details nevertheless suggested patterning (at least conceptually) on some sort of actual, though relatively primitive, class of sub. I knew it was something pre-WWII, but never exactly what - until I studied the design of the S-boat sail. The kit sail not only resembles the top part of the S-boat sail but also happens to be just the right size for this particular build!

I constructed the foundation for my sail much like the real thing - a central conning tower embedded in a fin-like "foot" around the base, and the above "boat-hat" surrounding the top, the latter two connected at the front by a vertical cutwater - in the process also exploiting the chance to get some use out of the Revell SkipJack's fanciful and emminently expendable "reactor vessel" (bottom-left), for the cylindrical conning tower.

Although my drawing is of the significantly different '20s-era sail, I was pretty sure its overall length, -height and level of the viewports would all have remained unchanged for S-37, in early 1942:


Click on Image to Enlarge At left, you can see how well my confection matches the drawing (bottom overlay). And at right, clearly my basic layout already produced the characteristic "knight's helmet" look of the S-boat sail.

However I was not at all satisfied that it matched - or would do so, even when finished - our reference pics of the real thing, particularly the near-perfect side-profile shot:


Compared to this, my sail above - though I knew it needed some additions - just seemed like it was going wrong on many counts: top too high, forward foot too high - which would mean my viewports and aft foot were also too high - yet the latter already looking too long, for its height!

Now I don't know about you, but more and more in builds these days I'm finding I don't really know what the hell I've got, until I take a digital picture and enlarge/analyze it on a monitor. I suppose I could've just taken some key measurements of my sail vs the above reference pic, but numbers can be confused and anyway nothing says it all like a direct photo-comparison:


Click on Image to Enlarge Revealing not only a perfect match at the front end (within limits of the imprecise photography) - but also that the aft foot should, if anything, be yet longer still!. Plus of course the top part extended further aft, and periscope shears added, both of which I had already anticipated.

This was just excellent news and much appreciated:


Click on Image to Enlarge Particularly considering the high price paid by my unsuspecting fingers, as I slipped and just creamed them - multiple times - with my malevolent and anti-social chisel!

Such is the Price of Progress - but progress we have, and will see more of...

Cheers,

-Matty