German submarine U96

Having watched a lot of submarine movies and documentaries lately I wanted to get into scale modelling apart from doing most of my projects in 28mm.

I stumbled across the 40 year anniversary box of U96, the submarine from the famous TV series “Das Boot” from Revell in 1:144 scale.

I cannot count the times I’ve already watched that TV series from 1981. It is about a german officer visiting the german Typ VII C submarine U96 as war correspondent. You get to know the everyday life and drill, the tension of hunting enemy ships, the cramped conditions and the danger of the hunter getting hunted waiting at 120m and below for a waterbomb to hit the boat.

With the new scale came new challenges as a lot of components were very tiny, especially the the guns, the periscopes and the antenna.

After cleaning and assembling I primed the whole model grey and then masked of the waterline with tape. I didn’t bother buying a paint kit with the historic accurate colours and went with what I had: Mechanicum standrad grey and Administratum grey from citadel.

The display stand was primed black.

On one pic you can see me assembling the boat watching the series 🙂

I then started with the weathering. I first did a heavy stippling and streaking with a sponge. I then coated the whole model with gloss varnish followed by dotting with black, brown and ochre oil paints. I then soaked a brush in white spirit and distributed the oil colour evenly.

I gave it a whole 24 hours to dry.

The next step was to add the decals both to the tower and the display stand.

I then added some rust effects using heavily thinned Skrag brown from Citadel.

I painted the flak gun with German Grey from Vallejo and the port and starboard lamps green and red. The periscopes where painted using Stormhost silver from Citadel and the tops were painted with Matt black from Army Painter.

I painted the propellers using Brassy Brass form Vallejo game coulour.

I then did a final coat of gloss varnish followed by matt varnish to seal everything.

After finishing the model I dug out an ocean gaming mat I had laying around and did some action shots.

Hope you like it!

Thanks for reading and until next time!