¹⁄35

Jaws

Elco, how lame can you go

As usual I had to find the right boat. Now came the conscience case. If you won’t see me dead modeling German World War 2 subjects, you wouldn’t normally see me modeling English or American one either. For no other reason than I don’t like to model the “good” or “efficient” subjects. Sadly I was about to find out that no other country than the USA painted shark heads on their boats at any time in history.

I was left with a short list of boat types.

The Vietnam War’s Pibber was out of the question as it simply wouldn’t have fit with the time of history I am most at ease with. Fairmiles was a definite “No” because of the angular lines and it’s definitely not very good looking boat. Then I was told of Moby Dick’s “Pequod” which wears a sort of white mouth. Now that would have been a great idea, but I needed to paint it red for better color balance, and then I am not one to mess with great literature. The only boat left on my list was the Elco.

Here I was really not very happy with what I found out. Indeed I always liked the Elco’s aggressive lines, and then the round shapes of the first series are really great looking. But Italeri put out the model in 1/35 last year – worse even, after checking the Conway’s “Allied Coastal Forces Of WWII: Vosper MTBs and US Elco” book, it appeared that the only series from which at least one boat wore the shark head is the same as the better known PT 109 of Kennedy’s fame. So here I was about to do something that looked like one of the best known ships of WW2, something that has been declined in model in every scale, and furthermore I had to set the diorama in the merry Southern seas –all in all the complete opposite of what my dioramas are about. But that was the price to pay so that I could still get a scene that could be reasonably plausible.

Something I set up right from the start was that no way would I buy the Italeri kit nor would I ask anybody to make me a form of the nose of the model, I would do everything by myself as usual. And then I found the special edge I needed.

Crawling for pictures on Google, I found some of one particular boat that is currently being restored somewhere in the States, complete with a nice shark head. Well, I noticed that you could perfectly make out the planking of the boat behind the layers of paint, a possibility that was confirmed when I read about the way the boat was actually built, with overlapping plywood planks.

You can’t see much of it in operational pictures, maybe because they were applying too many layers of paint, or maybe because of the lighting I don’t know, but then I thought that as the model I was building would turn out being a wreck. I could certainly insist on those separation lines between the planks to accentuate the weathering and therefore had to model them so that their breaking would appear realistic.

With the help of the aforementioned book’s great quality plans, I set up with building the front part of the hull. I wanted to cut it so that the visible part would look the most graceful and looked like some sort of leaf sticking out the water.