Hi everybody,
So, here is my attempt to go back and show what changes I made to my Akula Gepard.
The bow didn't seem sleek enough. I sanded it down some. It didn't occur to me to cut off the bow and fill it with putty until my Yasen class build later on so I was limited by the thickness of the plastic and didn't sand it as much as I would have liked.
I filled in the original bow plane locations and moved them a little bit forward and down.
I tried to thin the existing bow planes but that didn't work too well so I ended up with new ones from plastic sheet.
I originally thought about adding extensions to the existing rear horizontal fins and rudders but decided that it would be easier to make new ones rather than try to blend in new extensions with original fins.
The conning tower seemed a little short in height and length. I cut it off, added tabs to the bottom, reattached it in a slightly raised position, and filled in the open area between it and the hull. Following and extending the curves of the front and rear of the tower added the extra length that was needed. Also, with the tower removed from the hull, I was able to sand down the sides of the tower base so that it wouldn't curve outwards.
In order to move the two front periscopes forward. I just cut out this area of the tower, rotated it 180 degrees and reattached it.
Here you can see the new positions of the periscopes and I also added a couple more poles made of metal rod to the top.
The water intake didn't look like anything could get "in". So I cut off part of it, Sandwiched the remaining piece between a couple of plastic sheets and trimmed to shape. It's a little too bulky and I considered reworking it by using a thinner plastic sheet center instead. In the end though, I just left it bulky.
The propeller blades looked a little small to me and they had the opposite pitch angle of what they should be. At first I tried to just cut off the original blades and rearrange them but that didn't work. I made a new center piece out of plastic rod. Using a drawing posted by Danilla on another forum, I cut out seven identical (I wish) blades and attached them to the new plastic rod.
Thanks to a quick response by Tim to my question posted over in the russian sub CASF thread I was able to add a bow emblem to the sub. After about 8 hours I had a new emblem similar to the original. I made up my own slogan "supremacy through agility and stealth" and used a combination of translation programs and font programs to basically get what I wanted. Not all the letters came out correct. Sadly, the self made decal was not as resistant to the microsol so it took a few attempts to get a decal to make it this far. As you can see, even this one has been destroyed in some areas. I didn't want to push my luck so I decided that this one was good enough.
Lastly, here's a few pics of it all finished.
This could have turned out better had I decided to make the changes before I had already glued the thing together. Oops.... Oh well, I still like it.
Thanks for looking,
Dan.
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) because they are much more in scale than what you generally find in subs of this scale and I also applaud the choice of showing the limber holes shut for once and not those horrible "fake-empty" things that never look the part unless you go the extra length (as Dan has here) and drill them out.
Keep it going since I see some projects haven't been completed yet.