USS Nautilus (SS-168), 1930-1945.
Formerly named V-6 (SC-2)

USS Nautilus, a 2730-ton Narwhal class cruiser submarine, was built at the Mare Island Navy Yard, California. Commissioned in July 1930 as USS V-6 (SC-2), she was renamed Nautilus in February 1931 and redesignated SS-168 in July 1931. Prior to World War II, she was mainly operated in the Pacific, based at Pearl Harbor and at San Diego. Modernized between July 1941 and April 1942, her first war patrol included intense involvement in the Battle of Midway, during which she attacked a Japanese aircraft carrier that was at that time identified as Soryu but was more probably Kaga. Later during that patrol, while off Japan, she sank the destroyer Yamakaze.

It took me a long time to get started on this kit and once underway, it was punctuated by long layoffs. I can only guess that ships are not my main interest at this time. That combined with some problems I had made this into a long build.

The first thing I did was to remove the hull from the resin casting block. This was a rather painless task, though I did leave some excess material in a few locations. Simply scribing the hull with an Xacto knife was all that it took. I started sanding off the ensuing ridge that was left and here is where I ran into real trouble. That trouble was in the form of air bubbles. As I removed the ridge, I opened up a lot of these bubbles. Once relatively smooth, I started filling them and sanding them smooth only to open even more bubbles. Well, you get the point by now. After two weeks work, not only did I still have air bubbles, but I had damaged the stabilizers that run along each side near the bottom of the boat. So badly, in fact, that I'll have to replace them with strip plastic when the time comes. It is at this time that I put the kit up and went to work on other stuff.

Three months later..... Work on the kit was resumed. A bit more filling and careful sanding got things to an acceptable point. There are still pinholes but hopefully they will be filled with paint. I started to cut the sail deck off the resin block. This is a thin part so I cut very carefully. Unfortunately, not carefully enough as when I got it about half way, I broke the deck in two!  AAARRRRGGGGHHHH! I finished off the job of removing the piece from the block, sanded everything flat and then put things back in the box and went off to work on something else.

Two more months pass. Now one month away from a contest that has a category for torpedo carrying stuff. The deck is glued back into one piece. Not too bad. It is then superglued to the hull. Looks ok. Wait a minute, it isn't perfectly straight. No way can I get this piece off again!  Now onto the big deck guns as per the instructions. The small pieces have lots of flash on them and are difficult to clean up (at least for my ham fists). I do eventually get two 6" guns and mounts to look like something and glue those to the pedestal mounts on the gun deck. 

Next are the AA guns. There are five of them in the kit and these have the best molding of all the small bits. No flash either. The kit needs three of them, one with a brass shield. No problem here and they are glued on as per the instructions. Next the nest of periscopes. This assembly is really full of flash and mismatched mold halves. Much scraping eventually gets something that looks OK and this is glued onto the deck as well. 

Next, the instructions tell you to do the diving planes; either up or down. Well, I'd like to do them up, but there is no description of how they look. The pieces are obviously molded in the down position so that is how they will be mounted just prior to painting. I'm waiting until then because otherwise I'll just break them off.

Towards the rear the props, prop shaft, shaft mounts, rudder and rear planes have to be glued on. The rudder and rear planes are in good shape and clean up well. The shaft mounts and props are not and take a lot of work. The prop shafts themselves need to be made from plastic rod that is enclosed in the kit.

First thing I do is to drill a small hole to mount the rudder. Once that is done and alignment is checked, the prop shaft mounts are superglued in place. There is no locator for these parts, so they are glued where it looks nice. The outside parts of the mount are in desperate need of some sort of smoothing out, so a dab of filler and some sanding fairs those mounts in with the hull so they don't look just tacked on. The end result is acceptable. 

Now on to the etched brass.  Most of the parts fit fairly well, however, the railings around the guns were a disaster. Despite numerous attempts, I only managed to destroy two of the four pieces and the two remaining were rather badly mangled by the time they were fixed. I was so frustrated that the kit sat in its box for the next four months.

It had now been nearly 11 months since starting on the kit. I was determined to finish the darn thing! This meant finishing up the railing problem and fixing the stabilizers as well as putting on the last few bits of etched brass, painting the kit and building a mount for it. Piece of cake! First thing was the forward railing. I used some 'spare' railing and simply glued it in place. This is the way the original pieces should have fit. No hassles.

Now that the railing problem had been taken care of, it was time to fix the stabilizers. What was done, was that a piece of styrene strip was glued on the outside of the damaged stabilizer. Then it was simply sanded to shape, though a touch larger than the damaged one. With the kit permanently mounted on a base, the fix should not be too obvious.

There were a number of other etched parts that needed to be installed, specifically the prop guards and a few other smaller bits. Then the kit was ready for the paint shop