by Timm Smith
1/144 USS Tautog SS-199, 1959 (Trumpeter)
USS Tautog, a 1475-ton Tambor class submarine built at Groton, Connecticut, was commissioned in early July 1940. She is credited with shooting down one of the first Japanese planes at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. She had an extraordinary combat career, the details of which can be found on many war history sites. What interests me about this particular boat is the fact that she ended her existence in my home town, Manistee MI. Her 40 mm gun survives and is on display in front of the Manistee VFW hall. Her 4”50 deck gun now finds it's home on SS Pampanito in San Francisco, CA. Conversation with the older men of the community and local gun club members reveals that the barrel of the deck gun was cut in half with a blow torch during demolition and was reattached after interest was found from the preservation folks from the Pampanito project. The cut off barrel can be seen in my Youtube video. Before scrapping, Tautog was docked in the Manistee River channel and opened for public tours. My father, Sherwood Smith filmed the boat and the cut up pieces with his 8mm home movie camera. I converted the film to video and posted at Youtube. Navsource has pictures I submitted here .
Starting with the Trumpeter 1:144 late Gato kit, I also bought the White Ensigns Models photo-etch and the Nautilus resin deck guns. WEM's periscope shears and radar antenna really add a much needed dimension that the plastic kit parts lack. Lots of scratch-building, using Evergreen sheet polystyrene and various brass, copper, and steel wire and flat stock. For rigging I used 6/0 and 8/0 uni-thread fly tying line. For the radio wire insulators I used the suggestions from this forum and purchased 30AWG wirewrap wire with kynar insulation from Radio shack, using the insulation only. Paint was Pollyscale acrylics, 5-L gray and a custom mix for black. I tried to think of paint tones and scale effect that I read about in David Griffiths book, Ship Models from Kits. I also, for the first time, attempted some weathering using oil paints in washes.
My model represents USS Tautog as she appeared in late 1959,'60-'61 just before she was pulled from the water. The hand rails and paint scheme were in a modified condition as her last duty was as a stationary training boat in Milwaukee WI.
For all the macro photography buffs out there I want to make a plug for a photo stacking program that I use for this photography. CombineZM by Alan Hadley is an open source program that I find very useful for such a goal. Macro photography's inherent problem is the extremely short field of focus. By taking a series of photos, focusing on points from close to far, creates the 'stack' of photos to manipulate. The use of a tripod is mandatory so the stacked photos are framed very similar in content. I also use a digital SLR camera set in the aperture priority mode with the aperture stopped down to the smallest value (highest number). The program then compares all photos in the stack, finds landmarks and then combines all the sharp focus areas into one finished photograph.
