Dave Hussey’s Seaview
Here is a photo of my Polar Lights Seaview modified with the Rebellion Creations bow and Flying Sub. The result is very nice but there is a bit of work involved in getting there.
If you have one of these Rebellion kits the first thing you will notice is that the detail is fairly soft and there are a lot of pin holes for you to fill.
Attaching the bow was a somewhat traumatic experience for me. I assembled the hull of my Seaview and then, using a fine hacksaw blade, sawed the bow completely off! The goal here is to make the cut perfectly straight vertically and from side to side. Otherwise the bow may tilt up or down, point to the left or right or some awful combination of that. I attached the bow by lining up the top deck, matching the hull fins on the bow with those on the sub’s hull and being VERY careful to make sure the bow was straight when I glued it in place. I used a small amount of CA glue; in case of a misalignment I planned to detach the bow and try again. But I got lucky and the alignment looked good right off the bat. I then applied more CA and packed the joint from the inside with copious amounts of 2-part 24 hour epoxy. This combination of glues gives a very strong and rugged join. Once you attach the bow you will very likely find that the free flooding deck and the round pressure hull of the bow are smaller than the corresponding sections of the Polar Lights sub. That launched me on a series of multiple fill and sand cycles to build up the pressure hull and top deck to the appropriate width. But as you can see, it can be done!
As the resin bow makes the ship heavy at the front, I counterbalanced it by epoxying pennies into the stern until I had the thing balanced. Don’t glue the hull bottom in place until you do this. Also, the new bow lengthens the sub somewhat. To nicely center the now longer the sub on the base, I drilled a new hole for the base’s pin about under the conning tower / sail of the sub.
The Rebellion kit comes with a replacement conning tower / sail. The main difference between it and the one in the Polar Lights kit is that the Rebellion sail has a sharp corner at the top rear of the sail to replicate the look of the later season TV sub; whereas the Polar Lights sail is rounded there as the sub appeared in the movie and early season. I elected to discard the Rebellion sail which was fairly roughly cast. Instead, I kept the Polar Lights sail and built up a sharp trailing corner with filler.
The Flying Sub exhaust was accomplished as follows. I got some soft copper wire from the local hobby shop and twisted two lengths of it together. One end was epoxied to the flat floor of the Seaview’s base. A notch was cut in the back of the mountain base for the wire to protrude from. Then, the wires at the other end were untwisted to leave two wires about 1/4 inch apart and about 1.5 inches long. I drilled two holes in the back of the Flying Sub where the jet exhausts are and inserted the wires into the holes. The exhaust / bubble exhaust trail from the Flying Sub was fabricated using very tiny glass beads that can be found at craft stores. They are available in several colors. I selected Turquoise to replicate the look of frothed up water. Specifically, they are “Glass Seed Beads for Needlework Projects by Mill Hill. No. 02016”. I bought a couple of packages and CA’ed them to the wire and that’s all there is to it. The mailing address on the back of the package is:
Gay Bowles Sales Inc,
Jamesville, WI 53545
All in all, this makes for a very lovely model if you can bring yourself to cut up a Seaview and also do all the filling and sanding! But I think its well worth it.
Dave Hussey
