Just picking up on this after letting it sit for awhile in my stash. Its a simple kit with few parts but some challenges due to warping, weird brittle plastic and a need for extra detail work. The kit is fairly rare and was therefore expensive on eBay. I had done some bending work with hot water to get the upper and lower halves to wed properly and then just left it to work on easier builds for more than a year. Today I finally started to glue major parts together and also open up the conning tower windows by thinning the plastic from behind. So far, so good. Hull gluing is in progress in the pics but is completed now. It looks like this could be my first completed build of a maritime subject. I have a replacement twin 25 mm AA gun on order from ebay. Otherwise, I have everything on hand to build this now.

A couple of comments on the subject matter. I think IJN subs have beautiful lines and the i-19 is no exception. The stowed scout aircraft B-1 subs carried is also a fascinating feature. The Nichimo kit represents the I-19, which was an incredibly successful submarine in an otherwise undistinguished fleet. On September 15th, 1942, it sank the carrier USS Wasp, severely damaged the battleship USS North Carolina and sank the destroyer USS O'Brien with a single spread of six torpedoes.

I hope some will find this build as interesting as it is for me. Comments welcome.

Nice entry and solid start, Colin @coling. Nichimo is new to me, so looking forward to see how this one progresses.

Thanks. Spiros. This is the first Nichimo kit I have built. It is quite finely molded with petite surface detail but the plastic is weirdly resistant to liquid glue, and also hard and brittle. It sands OK, though, which is good because I had to do a lot of that today to get the hull finished. Nichimo has an interesting range of 1/200 ships, which I am guessing were originally produced in the 70s. This one is motorized but I have no interest in that feature. There are very few good-sized kits around of IJN subs, except really tiny ones in 1/350 and even tinier in 1/700. I would love to have a 1/72 version to match my U-Boat and Gato. The Tamiya I-400 in 1/350 is a decent size because it was such a huge vessel. Almost all the ships in my stash are 1/350 (mainly cruisers and aircraft carriers) but I found the version of the I-19 I had in that scale was too small to inspire building. Anyway, this has just the right proportions size for me to detail without going cross-eyed. Hope you like it.

Thanks, Erik. The tiny E14Y "Glen" floatplane it carries will be an interesting challenge in itself. At least it is not so tiny as the planes on a 1/350 or 1/700 aircraft carrier.

I went looking for this kit once upon a time and was not successful finding it then. All of then IJN Navy is interesting because of a very different approach to what was thought required at the time. The innovations were of great surprise to the Allies, especially the carrier submarines that the US had tried but had not found the secret of the twin pressure hulls. I have the I-400 somewhere in the stash and also in mid build. I was planning on matching it in a diorama with the hybrid carrier Mogami.