Iron Shipwrights USS Triton SSN-586

The USS Triton was a nuclear-powered radar picket submarine commissioned in 1959. Radar picket platforms increase the detection radius of a military force to reduce the chances of surprise attack; when initially serving in this role, the Triton carried a SSRN designation. This mission, however, soon passed to aircraft like the Grumman WF-2 Tracer and the Triton was converted to an attack submarine with an at-sea air strike capability.

Triton is large, even by modern-day standards: at 136 meters long and powered by two nuclear reactors, she was the largest, most powerful, and most expensive submarine ever built when she was launched in 1959. Her claim to fame, beyond serving as flagship of Commander, Submarine Force Atlantic, is the first submerged circumnavigation of the globe. There's even a plaque commemorating the achievement at City Hall in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Spain. Why Spain? Because 500 years ago some Spanish dude did it first apparently.

The Kit

This is the Iron Shipwrights 1/350-scale USS Triton SSN-586. It is a cast- and 3D-printed resin model with some optional photoetch railings for in-port configuration. The hull of the submarine is one large, heavy, solid piece of cast resin 15" long. The conning tower, dive planes, rudder, and scopes & antennae are 3D-printed. This kit is pricey (around $100 in 2024) and honestly the quality didn't blow me away. The cast resin body has a considerable field of air bubbles on the bottom,

Thankfully this is a rather featureless area of the model and so these can be filled without too much trouble, but it took several treatments of dissolved putty and CA glue to become passably smooth. Meanwhile, the top of the hull is nicely detailed and was free of imperfections. Several of the 3D printed parts did not look fully cured, with several soft "wet" spots, but sunlight and a UV lamp didn't help. I was able to clean these spots up with light sanding though, so if curing was the issue it was only topical. A very nice perk is that we get several extra 3D-printed parts to account for loss and breakage, but alas not all these are usable as some of the parts were inadvertently printed attached to each other, and some were malformed. While none of the imperfections were showstoppers by any means, at this price-point I expect better quality control. There is a fully 3D-printed kit by OKB Grigorov that is substantially cheaper and might be of better value here.

The screws were among the 3D-printed parts, and they were nice and thin and correctly scaled. But, so nice and thin that they were virtually impossible to remove from the support without breaking pieces off. Ideally these parts would be photoetch, as some of the name brand vendors offer: sharper edges, thin but sturdy. And they take a metallic finish more lustrous.

We are required to provide our own 1 mm wire for the screw drive shafts, cut to an impressively precise length of 20.83 mm. Except this measurement is actually off by several mm, and the propeller housing supports are waaaay to long for the shafts to run parallel to the body of the sub. No big deal to correct, but still...100 bucks man.

We get some decals, but they're for 1/192-scale ships: numbers and draft markings. The size of the numbers is close to correct, but the draft marking are not. I used them anyway, but still...

The directions don't discuss paint colors or decal placement, so one needs to consult photographs (which are all in black & white). It looks like the entire vessel is black so that's what I went with. Some photos show hull numbers, but not all. I would have included these but we don't get appropriate-sized decals.

I gave the model a light gray enamel pin wash and applied some light gray, white, and black oils to create some streaks down around the hull. The various antennae got the leopard spot scheme, which I did by hand (please guys, give us decals for this kind of thing!). Finally, the propellers and shafts were done in Alclad Pale Gold.

In all, a very easy build but a difficult and time-consuming project, if that makes sense. I've got a few more Iron Shipwright kits in the stash that I'm eyeing warily. But, these are one-of-a-kind kits and the finished model does come together.