S.M. U9 - Das Werk - 1/72 (static)

[DrSchmidt]

The conning tower is made of a few, well fitting parts. The only drawback is again the too wide nose. This time I fixed it with some styrene that I filed into shape. Then the conning tower is glued to the hull....looks nice.













The stern had two muzzle doors. The kit recreates this assembly nicely using three parts. Onto the stern and this section is done, too.





The gap, originating from the re-shaped bow, was then closed using styrene sheet material and putty.



Then I continued with the first details on the deck. Some of the vent openings were drilled open and a deck panel that was not present on the original (according to RCSubs) was removed using putty.







Finally I assembled the propeller axis the respective supports and the rudder and glued them into place. Again nicely fitting parts. So far I like the kit...

[DrSchmidt]

I continued with the deck. One has to glue two shafts to the underside of the deck. The shafts are made of three parts and seem to house winches or valves. I'll have to look up their original function. Nevertheless, nice detailing.







The well for the exhaust mast got its primer and was then painted in Vallejo hull red. I applied a good chunk of Miliput below the position of the mast which will be used to fix the mast with a bolt. Here I deviate from the normal installation order, as normally the mast would have been installed movable together with the well. I'll keep it fixed, so the Miliput and the bolt. Nevertheless, the well looks quite fine under the deck.









I'll also replace the stand of the kit. So I glued two M4 screws to the bottom of the hull from inside using Epoxy.





Finally I glued the deck into place. I'd had to adjust the width of the deck to be able to install it. I might have pulled together the hulls a bit too much when I assembled the hull. With all the cross bracings there is no flexibility whatsoever, so I had to make the adjustments on the deck. But that was no major issue.

[DrSchmidt]

Before the installation of the deck, I improved the hold for the exhaust mast. It's already a nice part that shows the upper side of the pressure hull, but of course it was not closed but open to deck superstructure. RC Subs offers a replacement, but I took the dimensions of the original part, designed extensions and printed them. They were then glued to the left and right of the styrene part using superglue and then the styrene between the struts was drilled and filed away, Voila, an open structure with a bit more of the pressure hull.

[DrSchmidt]

It's going to be staticdisplay model. So no, it's ot going to be a functional RC model. But I'm working on the SM U1 which will be RC

[roedj]

I, too, like the look of the "older" boats. Your work seems to be very nice but I have questions mainly on your use of the word -- STATIC.

1) Is this model intended to be a "shelf queen" and never get wet,

OR...

2) Are you, somehow, going to cram a bunch of RC stuff in there and get wet?

Captain Confused

[DrSchmidt]

After the little UB1 project it's time for something bigger again. As a big fan of the German Imperial Navy submarines I instantly fell in love with the S.M. U9 kit by Das Werk in 1/72 scale and bought it right away when it hit the stores. RC Subs provides an excellent PE enhancement kit that also went into the shopping card. And now I feel like getting this boat done.

First part of the build is joining the halves of the hull. The hull is detailed quite beautifully and has an excellent fit. But I knew from other build blogs and also from the manual of the RC Subs PE kit, that the bow is much too wide., about 3-4 mm. In reals that would have meant a bow with 25 - 30 cm width (10-12 Inches). Now way. So the first thing I did was to thin down the bow line and adjust the hull line back to the muzzle door bulkhead. In the end I came up with a bow of about 0,3 mm width, about 20 mm in real. That's O.K.. After that everything was pretty much straight forward: One has to install three bulkheads and a good amount of cross bracings. I glued everything to one hull and joined that hulls provisionally to get a proper alignment of bulkheads and bracings. After letting everything set over night, I glued the two halves together. Looks good so far...