77" Type IX U-Boat

[Davjacva]

Continuing on with the final mandatory plethora of small items that need to get done before painting. Dave's doing all this final hull interface/ alignment stuff, and installing the lighting system I made up a few months ago. Tomorrow, we go to the lake and do an initial dunk of the sub in the lake. At 77" it's just too damn big for the bathtub, the regular dunk tank, and even cross-wise it won't fit into my hot tub...so the lake it is. Weighed it yesterday with a battery and it came out to 10.7pds, and we're going to add 2 pounds of lead down low in order to get a good metacentric-aspect on this thing when it goes in. It's got about 4 +/- pounds of lift in the WTC so am anticipating strapping on a good bit of foam to start out just to start out. This will be ballpark and I'll get it back once or twice the following week to dial it all in. It's all theory until you put it in the water. Kind of like Mike Tyson's saying, 'Everybody's got a plan until they get hit in the face'. Anyway, the entire hull is now able to be locked down and is tightened up. I still have to clean up the back end with Bondo and the big gap that's developed on the front section. After that, it's getting washed, all metal acid-etched, Prep-Sol'd, primered, then base-coat painted. Not sure how much detail painting I'm going to get done. Probably not until after we get back from Cahutta. Other details like the antenna cables, and the rear stanchions aren't getting done until after we get back.

[Davjacva]

Sweet. Are you bringing it to Georgia?

Hopefully, it's getting close. It'll be operational and base-coated. Detailing is going to have to wait until after.

[Das Boot]

Sweet. Are you bringing it to Georgia?

[Davjacva]

Last work for the week is getting the upper hull pieces to be able to 'lock-in' with the lower hull without having to use fasteners. Here, the forward section is held down by a pin forward, but it had nothing aft. This left the large middle section able to flop up. To correct that, Dave made a interfacing bracket that mounts on the rear of the upper hull and inserts into the hull, then you push forward to lock kit. Easy-peasy, no magnets or fasteners. Will do the middle and aft sections this week.The last photos are of the overall model coming together.

[Davjacva]

Next up is getting all the actuating linkages connected to the WTC. Here you can see the bow planes linkage. It's a hog. When Dave was doing it, I thought it was the conduit for the actual actuator, but it was the 'actual actuator'. I didn't take specific pics of the rudder and stern actuators as that work went pretty quickly and missed it. Both ends were a trick to fix up. You can see initial photos of the rear end that attaches to the magnet has a straight 90-deg fix. This had to be changed to go over the rudder control and you later see it curved. Try doing bending aluminum piping without a proper pipe bender. Dave did it the caveman way, and it works great. Getting photos in these tight spaces with the camera sensors is a pain, so this is what you get.

[Davjacva]

We're getting down to the wire regarding showing up to SUBFEST with completed projects. The work on SSN-591 (1/96) delayed work on the Type IX for about 4 months. We made that decision and it was a good one. Now we're racing the clock to get the Type IX completed. Here the WTC is being converted over from a SNORT to a full SAS system. What you don't see here, is that the WTC at a few levels kept crapping out on us. First we had to swap the receiver, then the BLM was removed and replaced with a fail safe...lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my!!! Each day for a week, we'd fail, the Dave would pull something out of his at and get it communicating with the transmitter, then WHAM!!! The next device in line would go, and it went like this all week long until finally it all worked. Most of these components had been working before, and there's no explanation...except gremlins, goblins, or PFM!! Anyway, here's pics of installing the components to get the SAS system operating. That's the only good picture showing the underside of the sail, sorry. The hoses and hookups were installed later in the week, and we tested it in the dunk tank and all was good...after a few subsequent leaks were fixed (didn't expect perfection right off, did ya?). The WTC is longer than quite a few of the subs in the shop and now it works very well.

[Davjacva]

Time to make a coffin. The U-boat was over at Merriman's when I got the dimensions for the box, then later I had to bring it over to do all the foam dimensions. You never realize what something's going to look like, especially in size (81.5"). I really have nothing to complain about after seeing the Balao that Bob and Jason trailered to SUBFEST 23, but it still is a bit. After two weeks, it's done.

[Davjacva]

This is a fabulous model and I'm enjoying watching your progress. I like the Engel piston tank system but I can understand why you would want to change it to a WTC, especially due to the weight. I've found the Type IX hard to get a WTC to fit into without a lot of it being above the water line. The shape of the hull is long and skinny and not very tall. The way it gradually tapers at both ends makes it tough too. You either have to use a small diameter cylinder or have a very large ballast tank to overcome all the buoyancy above the water line.

It sure looks like your hull is the same IXD2 that Engel still sells. I've not seen that they ever offered a different variation of type IX. It's the exact same length and looks to have the same details. The D2 variant is 40' longer than a IXc but all that extra length isn't in front of the conning tower. The tower is still proportionally about the same distance from the bow and stern so doesn't look obviously different at a glance. If it is a IXD2 at 77" (1.95m) that makes it 1/45 scale.

Thanks for posting all the photos. Keep up the good work!

Jason

Jason,
while the math works out in either scale for overall length. I've scaled this to the Revell 1/72 (U-505) and it's pretty close. There's also a great drawing of a D2 in Rossler's U-boat book in order to get some kind of dimensions. This is not a perfect 'as produced' model by any means, but it's not very far off from a IXC. Not at all near a IXD2. One of the dead give-aways is the stern. On mine is wide like a IXC. IXD2's were very noticeably narrower. The beam, draft, and overall height were much larger as well on a D2. Now, all that being said, I have yet to measure the current run of Engels. Mine has bow tubes, whereas the Engels does not. I was looking at Steve Hodges work on a Engels Type IXD2 that he did for a friend here on the forum. He used aftermarket Tower (T-IV) and a deck from some place over in Germany. Like everything Steve does it was superb work, and it very much looked the part. Bob did one too as I recall, can't remember if it was an Engles, but it was a IXD2. Anyway, I spent more time working on SSN-591 and only have a few working weeks to get the U-boat ready for SUBFEST-24. i was telling Merriman today that I'm going to finish what I can to get it into the water. Mechanically, Not so much, but the paint and finishing, I'm probably going to finish after SUBFEST-24. Forgot, those aftermarket parts are in 1/45 and the tower, though a different one, it still looks the part. This is kind of like a buddy of mine from Germany. We were at a model show displaying a lot of tank stuff. He took a 1/15 Panther turret from an old Verlinden kit and stuck it on a 1/16 King Tiger hull without the side skirts. At the time there wasn't a 1/16 Panther out and every tank wanted one. You couldn't imagine how many tanker modelers came up to inquire about it. 200 would be a very conservative number. We just laughed all about it later on. On mine, the detail is not steller, but I want to get it done. I'm normally a rivet counter, but this was a basket case when I got it. Should be a fun runner.

[Davjacva]

External rear dive plane control arm?

Why yes it is!!!!

[redboat219]

External rear dive plane control arm?

[Schmitty1944]

This is a fabulous model and I'm enjoying watching your progress. I like the Engel piston tank system but I can understand why you would want to change it to a WTC, especially due to the weight. I've found the Type IX hard to get a WTC to fit into without a lot of it being above the water line. The shape of the hull is long and skinny and not very tall. The way it gradually tapers at both ends makes it tough too. You either have to use a small diameter cylinder or have a very large ballast tank to overcome all the buoyancy above the water line.

It sure looks like your hull is the same IXD2 that Engel still sells. I've not seen that they ever offered a different variation of type IX. It's the exact same length and looks to have the same details. The D2 variant is 40' longer than a IXc but all that extra length isn't in front of the conning tower. The tower is still proportionally about the same distance from the bow and stern so doesn't look obviously different at a glance. If it is a IXD2 at 77" (1.95m) that makes it 1/45 scale.

Thanks for posting all the photos. Keep up the good work!

Jason

[Davjacva]

My main work today was working on SSN-591, but I had to bring all the stuff I was working on at my shop over (sail work and LED lighting) and put it all together as it will once again be the focus when the 591 is completed, sometime in July. I also needed to get the full overall measurements so I can start working on the travel-box for it as well. I also need to make a temporary dunk-tank out of framing and sheet plastic, so we can trim this thing out. We were going to use my hot tub (would've had to let it cool down to get an accurate trim), but it was just shy too short at the diagonals.

[Davjacva]

I haven't got much left on this sub to do, but I'm focusing work right now on SSN-591 getting the hull corrected and it's moving forward. On the other half of the week I'm finishing work on the Type IX...slowly. I removed the light housings on the sides of the sail and found via mistake and talking to Merriman that these can be machined quite a bit. So I machined the 5mm LED's to fit inside the brass housings. I'm using a 3mm LED for the stern light. Here I'm sacrificing blue LED's as I've got a gazzilion of them and don't have any need for them...yet. I've made a module with a voltage regulator and 3 capacitors to keep the voltage and current in check to protect the lights with the ever-changing battery sources.

[Davjacva]

Finishing up with re-creating the wintergarten for the sub's tower with my resistance soldering rig. Still need to clean up with files and rotary metal-impregnated rubber disks. Additionally, got the drive shafts working with the WTC. Dave made all new bushings for the existing steady bearings, as well as completely new props. Hooked it all up with the new interfacing 1/12 scale truck universals and...whack-a-whack-a-whack!! Lot's of alignment noise. Something was fishy and I kind of blanked out about it, but I knew from my days at automotive school there was something about the drive shaft that I wasn't getting right. Called my buddy Willy Loewer of CUSTOMRCMODELS to bounce it at, and he was out of town. Luckily, my predicament was far from foreign to trucks and cars. If fact, it's pretty much in about every rc truck and car instruction sheet regarding installation. The drive shaft has to be 'in phase', and ours was 'out of phase'. It goes like this, the leading and trailing connecting universals have to be in alignment, and the middle section has to be in alignment. This is because of the shifting weights involved. If they are 'out of phase', the different sections rotate at different speeds (dramatically) and the difference in shifting weights create the noise. The more the angle changes, the more the noise if it's 'out of phase'. The noise creates vibrations which will increase degradation of the drive shaft seals within the WTC and possibly other issues. Anyway, worked through that, hope this helps.
Jake

[He Who Shall Not Be Named]

Would it kill you to focus that god-damned camera of yours?????!!!!!......