Torpedo Boat Flotilla

Here's a bad picture of my fleet of 1/72nd scale torpedo boats. Why not?

The long grey one in the foreground is a German S-100. Behind it is a Lindberg "Coast Guard patrol boat", whatever that means. Aft of the S-100 is a Revell PT-109, and behind the PT-109 is an Airfix Vosper MBT.

The PT-109 is an old Revell kit. It's been around for a long time, and the molds seem to be deteriorating. The crew figures are misshapen and mutant, and thin parts like the propeller shafts and 20mm gun barrel are almost unusable. Flash and mold misalignment plague most of the other small parts. I replaced the shafts with wire, but managed to make the screws, depression railings, .5o-caliber guns and other small parts work. I added a 37mm deck gun from White Ensign Models, which curiously enough was harder to assemble than the PT-109 in the first place. I don't know what White Ensign uses for its "white metal parts", but they seem particularly immune to super glue. Most of the itme I spent on the model was spent improving the torpedo tubes - removing the seams and scratchbuilding representations of the loading hatches. When I do this kit again (as surely I will) I intend to model a boat from later in the war, with a 40mm Bofors, 37mm automatic cannon, lightweight torpedoes and torpedo racks, and masthead radar.

The Airfix MBT is a surprisingly nice kit, a bit unconvential in terms of engineering but it builts up into a pleasingly cluttered and detail-rich model. The crew figures are good, though the twin 20mm guns are not great. Beats me how the magazines attach to the guns! I faked it, and it looks okay from a distance, but my solution is not correct.

The Lindberg patrol boat is also surprisingly nice. It came with hardware so it could be battery-powered, but I left that out. The main problem with the kit is that I can't find any references for it. I have no idea what kind of boat it is. The 20mm guns are also dreadful; I replaced them with a single 20mm Oerlikon from an old PT-109 kit.

The Revell S-100 is the most modern of the four, and is a very nice kit, well-detailed, well-engineered and nice-fitting with a couple of exceptions. One is that the screws take a lot of work to make them look decent, and even then they don't match the real screws. Another is that the 37mm gun is dreadful. And the last is that the kit comes with no crew figures. I bought a set of Revell vinyl Kriegsmarine crew figures and I'll eventually paint a few for the S-100 (and for the Type-VIIC U-boat that I haven't started yet) but for now, the kit is devoid of crew. And what's up with that misshapen jaguar on the decal sheet?

Pay no attention to the collection of 1/70oth scale battleships!