[dhanners]

The moral of this modeling story is that when someone is kind enough to do a repaint for you, print it out right away to make sure the colors are right. You’ll both appreciate it.

Back in 2016, I was emailing back and forth with the late John Bowden and the subject of submarines arose and I said in passing that a model of the USS Jimmy Carter would be cool. A few days later I opened my email in-box to find John had repainted/revised Trent Henry’s Seawolf-class sub and I now had a model of the Jimmy Carter.

I saved it to my virtual stash on my iPad, and last week, after I built Trent’s Seawolf, I decided I’d build the Jimmy Carter, too. I loaded the file on my thumb drive, ambled down to my local copying shop and had them print the model.

The colors looked ok on my iPad, but I got home and looked at the printed pages and discovered the colors were, well, off. The Jimmy Carter is all black. The sub’s hull printed out in FOUR different shades of dark gray. Having zero repainting skills, there was nothing I could do, so here is an unintentionally colorful Jimmy Carter.

The Jimmy Carter is the third and last Seawolf-class submarine, but it is unlike its sister ships. A 30-meter Multi-Mission Platform, or MMP, was added to the hull. Much about it is secret, but it is known to include hatches for divers and remotely operated vehicles. It includes special operation equipment, an ROV handling system and other top-secret gear, as well as a passage between the fore and aft sections of the boat.

John’s repaint was in 1/200, but I resized the model to 1/250 to match my Seawolf. Like my Seawolf build, I scratchbuilt the pump jet propeller housing out of gray cardstock to make it more accurate than the version offered in the kit. (Yet another shade of dark gray on the model.)

Maybe I just need to add some judicious weathering....