The middle deck is made out of laminate reinforced with steel bars, so the drilling process can be tough! I didn’t like how it looked in the the end – as Engel has designed it. At first I did everything according to the manual. The original design of the WTC is clean and nice, but it doesn’t mean that it cannot be modified to become even better. It will make a lot of things much easier as after fitting all those levels for the servo pushrods space becomes harder to navigate. It’s important to remember to mount the stern dive planes first, then the lower rudder and the upper rudder at the end. The photo on the right shows the insides of the stern. Yet the job is fairly easy cause of the size of the model – lots of space to operate your hands.Īll the surfaces had been sanded down to a nice smooth finish and will look like a single element after panting. Everything needs to line up and move smoothly. Additionally you need to instal brass bearings for the moving parts of the planes and rudders. The tunnels need to be glued in and sanded down for a nice smooth fit, while the rudders had to be additionally reinforced by screwing them down to the hull itself. Still requiring a bit of precise measurement, but in general – it’s a fun thing to do. “Stern works” – nozzles, rudders and dive planes: Glueing the stern elements all together is a nice and peaceful job actually. That’s LOTS of work! I had to drill each with a small diameter drill first, then slowly use a bigger and bigger drill until the size was adequate for filling the hole down into a squared shape by a hand file. I wanted to have all of them in the same shape and size. I bought something like 10 of those and used almost all of them! Normal discs are simply not suitable for that, but in great quantity they did the job.Īs you cans see below, there are lots of slots in this boat. I had to use the normal ones, as those were the only with a diameter big enough for the job (at least for my Proxxon). Slots for the retractable bow planes were much harder to cut then I imagined, as my diamond cutting discs diameter was to small. Especially when you look closely at the thickness of the laminate.Ĭutting out the vents and the flooding holes:įew days of work, 3 files completely destroyed, calluses on my hands, lots of dust everywhere and one of the sides is finally done – something like 1/2 of the venting holes. The amount of work needed for cutting out the flooding and venting holes is a little scary. Details of the hull and tower are astonishing. I’ll finally have room to experiment with the torpedo systems, trimming ballast tanks and additional electronics. The kit will have retractable bow dive planes and periscopes of my own mechanism design, not the one from Engels). There are legends about the turning radius of this model, so my vessel will be equipped not with a single bow thruster, but with two such units – bow and stern one. I don’t posses the heavy equipment necessary for it – lathe (which I have very limited access to) or CNC and there is also a problem of buying elements which are sold in bulk, not mentioning a proper place for all the resin works… The crown jewel of the kit are two (0,825 litre each) Engel piston tanks with a TAES microprocessor driver.Īfter analysing the kit contents I’m absolutely sure that currently (year 2008), I have no conditions to make a scratch build model in such a quality. Two Raboesh scimitar propellers also included. Lots of grey plexiglass for the elements inside, geared drives – two, as the typhoon has two propellers, rudders, dive planes, lots of switches, retract mechanism for the bow dive planes, uncountable amount of tubes, wires and screws. The middle deck is made out of reinforced laminate. The obvious ones are the large laminated hull (upper half and lower half), the sail – which was made as a polyurethane resin cast and the middle deck which creates the dry section. Built finish: Last update/modification of the vessel. During the year 2008 I went to Germany to one of the model gatherings and after seeing those models with my own eyes I was sure that I don’t want one. For some time I was reading about the Engel piston tanks and was impressed by their quality and capabilities. I wanted to have a model with lots of room inside for additional systems and experiments. My first Engel Kit, bought after a long and difficult conversion of the Revell Type VIIC 1:72.
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