Alkmaar, Nederland. July 2020. In the middle of the COVID pandemic. The kit.
The box sat on my shelf for a couple of years, almost 3 to be precise. On arriving home from Antwerp, I'd examined the model in detail and what I'd see had frightened me so much I packed everything back in the box and hid it amongst the other unmade/unpainted items in my room.
Empress Miniatures make some lovely figures, full of detail and character. The u-boat was not one of them. The online reviews of the kit that I'd managed to find were all very complimentary about it, how it would be great for Pulp games, or as the centrepiece of a gaming board. My impression is that the people doing the reviews hadn't actually tried to make the bloody thing. In fairness to Empress Miniatures, they did state that this was a wargame piece and not a scale model of a u-boat. A visual representation, not an accurate rendering.
Banding lines, common on 3D printed items, are clearly visible on the bow section, along with some nasty flash. If I can't sand it away I'll need to try and incorporate it into the diorama. I don't know, maybe it's supposed to be some sort of bow wave.
Yep, the master clearly was produced on a 3D printer. The banding from each layer of the filament is even more obvious on the underneath of the bow section. In fact, it's visible on all sections.
All the resin pieces laid out where they should be. A dry fit of the model. Lots of gaps, lots of height and width differences that will need to be sorted and lots of sanding needed to reduce the banding that's visible on the hull parts.
The AA gun nest at the back of the conning tower is also a little rough around the edges.
And the resin flash completely fills the connection struts for attaching to the rest of the conning tower. This is hard resin, it will be a bugger to try and cut this out neatly. Given the shape of the structure, I'm worried it will not survive intact if the cutting out goes wrong.
Bugger. Not even started to assemble the model and it's already going tits up.
All these fiddly bits needed flash cleaning off them. I lost count of the number of times I lost one of the little wheels.