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Moebius Seaview (with mods)

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  • Member since
    January 2003
Posted by Orne on Wednesday, July 2, 2008 7:21 AM
Update - the hull coming together minus some of the deck and engine pods.  Reshaped the leading edge of the tailfins with .060 strips.  Widened the pod horizontal fins by half an inch at the rear edge; they looked a little too narrow out of the box.  

The only serious flaw I've found with the kit design, the hangar bay has an egg-shape to it, instead of the flattened hatch opening of the originals.  Inserted wedge-spacers inside the opening at the corners (arrows) to support the hatch (pressed the corners down and left it sandwiched between two bricks in the sun, let it cool down, and filed the edges a little to fit more snugly); the entire surrounding area (bordered with white lines) of the bay hump was padded with sections of sheet styrene, filed down smooth at the corners, and packed with several layers of glaze.  Still working on that section.

To match the extended hull length, moved the deck section  with the sail plug back several inches; reinserting other deck pieces to fill the gap.  Because most of those 'limber holes' made little sense on a modern nuclear boat, added thin .020 strips (cut from cheap 'For Rent' signs) to cover those; left exposed two small sets of vents on each side.

The 'bow-tie' outline of the main windows was opened up; added benefit is that more of the control room is visible.  The panes were cut from the upper cone of a liter pop bottle and glued inside the front-section.

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  • Member since
    January 2003
Posted by Orne on Sunday, June 8, 2008 7:06 AM
The control room with lighting attached.  Some parts salvaged from a pair of rechargeable flashlights, including two halogen lights for the rear lighting and searchlight, and the two square housings with LEDs mounted to the centerline.  The rest are clear/colored wheat bulbs.  The inner hull-halves around the control room were painted flat black and lined with metal tape; extra tape strips were added around the halogen bulbs to reflect any heat off the plastic.  Some added photos of the interior before lighting was attached.  It's very hard to see with the camera flash, but the interior is pretty well lit; most of the color wheats were washed out but a pair of clears mounted over the two recessed bays just behind the window area illuminates these.  All the wiring is connected to a power jack fitted inside the first display stand mounting-hole, and is powered by a standard 9V wallpack transformer.

The sail has three colored wheats for the position lights (two clears were mounted in the tailfins); I mounted a balsa inner deck with holes drilled out for the aluminum tube shafts.  One extra shaft was added for a second periscope.  I'm using the kit masts, but fixing them to aluminum tubes which will fit inside the shafts.  The trailing edge of the sail is a little too blunt, so added some evergreen strips and filed down to a knife-edge.

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  • Member since
    January 2003
Moebius Seaview (with mods)
Posted by Orne on Thursday, May 15, 2008 4:56 AM
Picked up the kit, fit the parts together - just about perfect alignment and well-thought out - and started taking a real look at the proportions and shapes.  One non-problematic oddity came up while I was fitting circular hull-bulkheads (I travel to a lot of shows with my models and have learned it's better to reinforce wherever possible), and found that the lower hull between the strakes is an 1/8" deeper than the hull is wide, resulting in an oblong/egg-shaped cross-section.  This isn't a drawback to the overall look of the model; on the other hand, anyone converting this model back into the eight-window version should account for it if they're using the studio-plans which have a fully circular hull cross-section.  The one other thing that struck me was that the strakes along the hull have semi-rounded edges, and this leads into the manta wings around the bow, which grows even more more rounded/blunt.   Also, my opinion only, the cross-section was too flat, with not enough down-curvature down toward the tips.  First thing I did was to score the lower half of the wing-set around the hangar, with narrow wedges fore and aft 'notched' out (the score-lines marked in photo) and the re-sectioned parts glued back onto the main section.  A .40 by .188 Evergreen strip was glued around the outer edges.  The upper half of the wings were scored and snapped away in a similar fashion, but spread out farther to 'wrap' around the lower tips (the white areas inside the score-lines), and packed with styrene strips.  The joints and the edges past the recessed joint-seams were filed down to thin them.  I used Bondo glaze to fill over all the work.  When I'm finished installing the control-room, the wings will be glued together and shaped; the few topside pictures I've seen show an ogive leading-edge til they reach the inset bow-planes.

The control room is a straightforward buildup, with glow-medium added to the acrylics for the missile-control panel, lights, radar/sonar screens, and TV displays (both have the same image, a giant manta ray creature gliding beneath an ice-flow).  The two scientists arguing about the creature, the two crewmembers at the helm-station (whom I had to bisect at the hips to fit behind the control-wheels), and the standing crewmembers, were resin castings I made impressions from in clay, then painted up to match the kit crew-figures.  The control-room looked a little barren of people so I went with this quick fix; because they were only detailed on the front-side, I positioned them at angles only visible through the main windows.  The remaining controls, etc. were picked out with pens, pencils, acrylics, and enamels.  The world-map was painted in on the port side of the observation room.  I lost one of the center-girders that fits behind the central window-frame, so traced the opposite piece on plastic sheet, drilled out the holes, cut out, and glued in place.  Still have to sort through some LEDs and rig internal lighting.  There is no ceiling or crossbeams in the kit, so making clear PETG ceiling with the beams glued in proper position.
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