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My name is Mike, and I have a problem. I'm an alcoh... no, I'm obsessed with minisubs I picked up this kit of the first documented undersea vehicle somewhere. I forget where, even though it was only a few weeks ago, just for its weirdness and the fact that doesn't really look like a submarine, more like a large and aggressive barrel. It's a short-run kit, and even though it's properly teeny-tiny, smaller than a pot of paint as it stands at the moment, I've done quite a bit of work to get it to the stage you can see below: I did an extensive clean-up of the parts, especially the main hull, which was a bit ragged around the edges, and was moulded in clear, as was the hatch that's next to it and covered with port holes. I deepened the plank-lines, and tried a new technique to me, drawing a fine wire brush down the planks to give them a bit of texture. Seems to have worked, but I'll probably do a little bit more before I paint it. The join-line between the two halves were very uneven, and were covered in faded recessed rivets, so I filled the gap in the middle with a view to replacing the rivets with raised alternatives. The sanding involved in getting them smooth left them looking a little vague too, so I cut some strips of 0.1mm styrene strip and glued it down with GS-Hypo cement, so they wouldn't melt if I used liquid glue, and I had a little bit of wiggle room that would be missing if I'd used CA. I've spent some of my remaining Archer rivets in making good, also adding a punched disc to replace the removed boss around the propeller shaft. I put a brass rod in the other side to replace the pip that was lost that was intended to hold the air tank on the back. I had to cut through the strips into the grooves for the rudder, which I'd also opened up and deepened so the rudder would actually sit in them. The underside has been smoothed flat, as has the counterweight oval, which has a little bit of a sink mark around its edges before. The hatch was moulded in clear, but was a bit messy, so I thinned it from the inside and polished it back to clarity, marked out the locations for the PE portholes, and glued them on with Klear after dipping the whole ring in it to improve clarity again. The interior diameter of the portholes are 2mm, so I punched out some discs from the edge of an Eduard mask set, and put them in place to protect the clarity of those areas too. I also drilled out a few holes there and here in preparation for all the greeblies that will need gluing on later. The box-like air tank was in two halves on the sprue, and needed some fettling after it was glued together, using a bit of UV curing resin on the end caps, then sanding it down after a blast of UV light. That's it for now. I'm as yet undecided how to paint the wooden areas of the barrel, and will be using my Kaiten 10's propellers as a test for the brass colour needed here and there on this one. It's all good fun