Speaking of hatch covers, Mikro-Mir’s use of photoetch is a mixed blessing. The hatch covers are molded in clear plastic and I did use the small masks to protect the clear deadlight in each one. I also shot all the remaining parts – diving planes, rudder/shroud assembly, and hatch covers – with the Black Gray color. I went back again and sprayed Black Gray with a drop or two of US Gray in the center of each panel and tied everything together with a light overcoat of the base hull color again. After applying this to the entire hull, I went back and added 25% Vallejo Black to the Black Gray base and shot this along all joint lines as well as on the fore-and-aft bands that were added to the Hunley during construction and gave her the oval cross sectional shape. I opted to use Vallejo Air Black Gray as my base color. Results from the deconcretion efforts in the Charleston laboratory suggest that the Hunley’s iron hull was painted black, and that some sort of caulking or sealant is applied at each hull joint location. I superglued the shroud to the rudder assembly, added the two p/e linkages, primed and painted it, and set the unit aside. I calculated the required circumference, cut the strip to size with a small amount of overlap, and used an old drafting circle template as a tool to maintain the circular shape while I superglued the lap joint. I couldn’t see myself making that work, so I scrounged around and found a piece of soft copper sheet in my junk box. The propeller shroud is unfortunately represented in the kit with two pieces of flat stock that you are to roll and butt-join to create the final part. I cut angled slots into the hub using a razor saw and mounting the blades was a simple task, using slow cure CA to ensure axial and radial alignment using my Mark One calibrated eyeball. I chucked the hub into a pin vise to clean up mold lines and stubs, and created a simple paper template with three 120 0 radial lines extending out from the center. The kit gives you a plastic prop hub with some very faint markings for location of the three photoetched blades. I elected to work on some of the detail parts to take a break from recreating rivet heads, and tackled the propeller assembly next. The outer ring of each mask was a perfect size to replicate the missing detail and I used the masks as parts, spraying Tamiya primer over the completed hull and sealing them into place. There was a postage-stamp sized piece of paper in the small bag of photoetched and clear parts I discovered that this is actually mask material for the deadlights. I did not plan to use the kit-supplied clear plastic portholes (more properly, deadlights), preferring to use Micro Kristal Klear after construction was done. The portholes atop the hull (10 in total) were surrounded by a small raised reinforcing plate and rivet detail. This trick worked well for me on the hull section joints. I had previously scratch built the USS Alligator, a Union Navy submersible, and I replicated its hull rivets with small dabs of white glue. Fortunately, I was able to restore much of it. Despite my best efforts, I did end up sanding away some of this detail. The result is a slight “figure 8” shape when joined, which led to a lot of filling and sanding – no big deal on the ballast weight portion of the (lower) hull, but unpleasant to deal with on the top of the hull, where there’s a lot of rivet and porthole detail. Both halves are slightly out of round, due no doubt to shrinkage stresses as the plastic cures. I cleaned up all of the parts, removing tree stubs and (minimal) flash and started by gluing the hull halves together. OK, let’s jump into the build, which is fairly straightforward. Very useful for small details such as rudder control arms. is a downloadable/printable rendering of the submarine done by Michael Crisafulli and may have been the basis for Mikro-Mir’s molds. is one interpretation of the spar torpedo configuration, appears to agree the best with the famous Conrad Chapman painting of 1898, and is the one I used for my build. is the official Hunley website, and well worth a visit Here are several websites that may be helpful to you if you elect to build this kit: It’s also quite possible that the actual configuration changed during the Hunley’s brief career, so my interpretation is just that – an engineering judgement on my part. In the end, I elected to go with my best judgement of how to represent these features, most of which involve the spar torpedo arrangement. There are numerous interpretations of different features of the boat, and online research probably raised more questions for me than answered them. As preservation of the original craft continues, more details come to light regularly. Disclaimer: Mikro-Mir’s 1/35 CSS Hunley is probably one of the more accurate representations of this iconic Civil War submersible.
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