SIG 144 Members forum

T Class British Submarine Tally-Ho

After having built the really nice the SSModels U Class submarine I decided to send for the T Class submarine. On opening the quite small well packed box and unwrapping the contents it was nice to see the well printed main hull parts, but the rest were not quite as detailed as the U class was. The hull is made up of 4 parts. After removing the casting scaffolding and the printing bases the hull sections were cleaned up. The bow section had the hydroplanes printed in the lowered position and were going to need some serious refining as they are quite chunky. I started working on it by thinning the forward hydroplanes and what looks like a small fin/fence at deck level above the hydroplanes. The starboard side anchor housing was also removed. The two centre sections were nice but again on the section with the rear facing torpedo tubes the tube surroundings also need thinning. The rear section with the hydroplanes and rudder were like the bows, box like. (once sanded they turned out to be pretty good). A rudder was scribed onto the fin The sections of hull were fixed together and any sign of the joints removed. The conning tower was removed from its printing cage and again found to be rather chunky, so it was worked on to make it look less toylike. I replaced the bridge wind deflectors and thinned the conning tower inner sides. (Time consuming as the plastic its printed in is so hard) Detail was added to the bridge inner surfaces not accurate but only to make it look busy. Handrails and stanchions add. Again, the deck gun in the T class is not a patch on the U class item (like chalk and cheese) so I removed the chunky hand wheel blobs and replaced them with some brass ones I had in the spares box. Extra details again added to the gun and deck inner sides. The same is also true for the 20mm Oerlikon and that was replaced with the excellent “Blackcat” 20mm Oerlikon gun.
These are the antennas that go on the rear deck. The first one is that supplied in the T Class kit. The second is that supplied in the U class kit. The third is my build to replace the T class lump of rubbish. Now it comes to painting. What colour is “Slime Green” or Shredded Lettuce? These colours are mentioned in the book “The Hunting Submarine” (Ian Trenowden). From inquires I had at the “Northern Model Show " it was thought to be a medium green colour so a bottle of “Model Color 70.890 was optioned at the show, and it will be tested to see if it fitted the bill. The paint turned out to be just what I thought it should look like to my eye. (As no one seemed to know for sure I was happy). It's a strange paint as when it went on it looked really nice later in the day it looked very dark but in sunlight it looks just right. Maybe the answer in the name of the paint “Refractive green” I now weathered the paintwork to blend it altogether and added the name to the conning tower. When the model was completed, it was mounted on brass pedestals to show the whole boat as mounting on a sea base would hide so much of the boat. If I had bought the “T” Class sub first I may not have bought the “U” class sub which would have been a shame as it certainly is a much better printed and detailed kit. Having said that I had to do some extra modelling to complete the bigger sub which was interesting, and I ended up with another great British submarine. The fun continues.

Very nice indeed, Malcolm!