Alvin Model Article

**ALVIN**
Click on the thumbnails to see full size images.

Just after Christmas I visited a friend of mine, Dermot, who has been doing collaborative work with Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institution in the US. A present had arrived for him, it was a kit of their deep submersible Alvin.
The kit came in a stout cardboard box, containing the main hull and base in bubble wrap. Numerous small resin parts were bagged in groups, and there was also a nameplate, a fret of photo-etched parts, two coils of wire, 12 metal rods and 30 odd short bits of plastic tubing, a piece of metal mesh and a small sheet of dry transfers. The instructions ran to six pages, one page of which specifically referred to the dry transfers, the remainder included two blurred colour pictures of the kit, a parts list and painting guide (hugely basic) and 3 pages of "exploded" style diagrams. Box art was a colour photocopy.
As he is not a model maker and he knows I am supposed to be, we struck a deal. I'd try and put it together for him so I'd have the fun of making it up and he'd get a nice finished kit (hopefully). One snag - a deadline of the 8th March - still 2 months and a bit should be OK. (Ha! Ha!)
My first problem was that the sail had been broken in shipping and had to be repaired with superglue and sanded to hide cracks. This was mostly successful. Similarly, the ladder for inside the sail was so badly broken up I nearly threw it out as scrap resin, fortunately after much gluing and some replacement bits from scrap card it was repaired.
The actual instructions were pretty useless and much guessing and cursing was involved in trying to work out what went where. I managed to find some pictures on the net, mostly at the Woods Hole site and also a couple of pictures of the made up model from Viking's web page. This made it clear that several of the small parts were missing and also the colour scheme was highly inaccurate. By this time I was already a few weeks down the line and there was no time to try and get replacements from the States.
So on with construction, after the usual clean-up, filling and thorough washing I primed the large parts with Halfords grey primer and used an acrylic grey primer on the small parts. There were some pinholes to fill and the cracks on the sail were still visible. The latter was seen to with further gap-filling superglue and sanding. I tried a new method I picked up off the "Garage Kits" site on the net. I used Liquitex acrylic modeling paste, smeared over the pinholes, excess wiped off and voila! - no more pinholes - well mostly. Anyhow once I had re-primed out came the trusty airbrush to paint Humbrol satin white enamel all over the hull and Tamyia gloss red acrylic on the sail. After laying down a few coats it was beginning to look OK. I placed the transfers on the sail and I must say they were excellent, the colours were strong and opaque and they rubbed down very easily without any film around the letters. A considerably easier job than the average water-slides.
At the same time as painting the hull and sail, I also worked on the base, this was a large piece of resin depicting the ocean floor with a large outcrop in the centre for Alvin to sit on and a group of tube worms at one end. After priming with the usual Halfords grey, I used acrylic inks to mix up a gunky mixture of brown/grey and sprayed over the base, going back with a lighter mixtures to highlight and darker to shade, especially brushed into the various cracks and crevices. I then added some green to the base mix and shot in some patches to give a bit of contrast. The tubeworms, judging by a couple of poor photos were a chalky white with a red tip. I used a mixture of Humbrol matt white and black to make up a suitable grey and painted the frond like tips a dark red mixture, with a thin white line around the edge as per the photos.

First there were the several dozen almost identical, but not quite, vaguely tubular bits which comprised the cameras, lights and hydraulic cylinders. Then there were the photo-etched parts that comprised sections of the starboard manipulator arm, the sonar support and the frame for the basket along with several small bits of no certain function. After some time spent examining the instructions and, more importantly the various pictures I had downloaded I made up the manipulator arms, this is where a large proportion of the various odd parts were pressed into service as around half the kit parts were missing. Two 1/48 scale underwing cannons from a Hawker Hurricane were cut down to make the pistons on the port manipulator and various bits ended up on the starboard one to try and get the look of the one photo I had.
The basket and its frame were a complete nightmare. First of all bending the basket frame and wire mesh proved almost impossible. However the support frame was even worse. After much trying to work out how the rods and short plastic tubes were supposed to fit together. I eventually produced my best guess - the instructions were impossible to follow and my eventual construction was basically guesswork, based on two bad photos and the assumption that all the parts should be used up. Also insufficient mesh had been provided for the piece at the back of the frame. After some hunting around I found a piece of J-cloth with a mesh pattern of around the right size, I painted it with a mixture of white PVA glue and green acrylic to stiffen it up. Once that was dry I gave it a final painting with a dark green and glued it into place with superglue.
Detail painting next. The crew compartment is a titanium sphere so careful painting with a mix of silver and satin black produced a suitable "dark steel". I also used this colour on the various "rivets" on the hull. The ballast weights were painted in a thin mix of leather, black and satin brown. Washed over the satin white, they gave a fairly convincing of look of rusted metal. The various cameras, lights etc., were painted in matt black and a mix of silver, aluminium and satin black to get the look of shiny metal, with various details picked out in matt white and grey.
Once the bits had dried I started attaching them to the main hull. First I assemble the utility bars on the forward hull. The main sections were bent wire with short lengths of wire as the uprights. I used gap filling superglue and accelerator to fix the parts together and simulate the welded joints. Some trimming of the uprights was required but otherwise this went together OK. They were then painted in matt black.

Next came attaching the front porthole and the manipulator arms. The porthole at first glance appears symmetrical but actually has different numbers of rivets at the top and bottom, fortunately one of the better photos showed which way up it should go (three rivets at the bottom). Then the manipulators, after some time consulting the photos and resisting the urge to feed the instructions into a shredder, I used a very sophisticated technique, guesswork. Given the length of the manipulators, I pinned them to the hull to give them a bit of extra strength. The sonar mount forward of the sail, consisted of two photo-etched and three resin parts. I made them up as a sub assembly and then carefully attached it with superglue. A small problem was caused by gluing the transducer (Part 1) on too far back, fortunately I was able to pry the part off and re-attach it without too much trouble. The cameras and lights required a certain amount of fiddling, as the positions were not entirely clear and as the parts appear to be a bit overscale they did not fit as per the photos. One other problem was the cameras and lights that sit on two posts to the port and starboard sides of the bow. The posts provided were far too short, but this was easily corrected by cutting down a couple of pins. There are two lights that both in the instructions and pictures are seen hanging from a special bracket to the port side of the forward utility bar and as having prominent bulbs, but both bracket and bulbs were absent. The former was made up from some bent wire and a scrap of sheet metal and the bulbs created from the tips of two 1/72 scale WW II underwing rockets glued in place and painted silver. I also realised one of the cameras (part 10) had been mis-moulded and the front of the camera was missing. A hunt through spares produced a model railway coupling which had a disk of just the right size, this was cut off and glued in place and once painted was indistinguishable from the original. The next bit was attaching the "hydraulic tanks", which consisted of two sets of small tanks and two large tanks. The small tanks were easy as one of the pictures showed their position clearly on the lower forward hull. However the large tanks could not be seen in any of the photos and as I had come to expect the instructions were not exactly clear. As by this time, I had two days before delivery (where did the time go?) I stuck them on the hull just above the manipulator arm mounts. Or I would have done if one had not fallen on the floor and disappeared completely. Panic time as I hunted through the spares box and eventually found a nuclear missile from an old Polaris submarine kit which once cut to length filled with superglue, sanded and painted provided a reasonably good substitute.

Finally on day T-2, I attached the lifting bar, thrusters and their protective cages to the main hull. The top central thruster mount was missing its end pieces but these were quickly made out of scrap plastic. Aside from the cages needing a bit of trimming to fit this went smoothly. I called it a day at that point as I think the superglue fumes were beginning to get to me. Either that or dragons were dancing outside my window.
Day T-1, I attached the frame and cage, the side mounting points were missing and substitutes were cobbled together using two 1/48 scale under wing rockets from the same Hurricane kit that provided the cannon, and bits of plasticard. These were then attached to the ends of the frame mounts and the cage was attached to the top of the frame. The whole assembly was then glued to the main hull, not without a struggle, as the frame had ended up a shade too wide and had to be held in position while the glue set. Even using accelerator, it was not easy, as I needed one hand for the hull, one for the frame, one for the glue and one for the accelerator. Once it was in place a quick check of the reference material revealed a forward mounting point that I had missed, and which there did not appear to be parts for. Brainwave! A quick hunt in the stationary drawer found a white paperclip. I cut and bent it to shape and with a small piece of plasticard as the mounting point we were back in business. I then trimmed the clear porthole covers and top hatch to fit, gave them a few coats of Klear (Future) silicon floor polish to hide the worst of the scratches and glued them in place with Micro Kristal Clear.
A careful visual check failed to find any more glaring errors or omissions so it was on to the final stages. First came the wiring. The kit came with two bundles of wire, one brown with black banding and one dark orange with brown banding. Judging from the pictures, there should also have been a bundle of black but this was absent, fortunately the spares box produced some lengths of computer ribbon cable which provided the necessary black wire. There was, of course, no wiring diagram and the photos of the model's colour registration was sufficiently out that it was not possible to tell which colour was hydraulic and which video feed. Some reasonably good close up pictures of the foredeck suggested that the orange should be video feed, black power and the brown hydraulic. That decision made, we were back to the ever reliable guesswork based on the available photos. I reasoned that the hydraulic cylinders would attach to the manipulators, and that all the lights would have power cables and all the cameras video and power cables. It was not at all clear where the various leads ended up but I ran the hydraulics from the various cylinders to areas adjacent to the pistons on the manipulator arms. The power from the back of each camera and light to a single point on the utility bars and then a thicker lead (black leather thong from Linda's jewellery making supplies) to the base of the sonar support where it joined the power cable from there. Video cable went from the back of each camera to a hole on the forward deck just starboard of the centre line. Attaching the wires was a tricky process, involving gap filling superglue, accelerator and several instances of gluing myself to bits of the kit or wire. I found using a small syringe to deliver a drop of accelerator to the right spot very helpful. Once this was all done and the glue fully cured I touched up as necessary and was ready for final assembly.
Sometime previously I had picked up some off cuts of wood in the local hardware store which had been roughly shaped as bases. One of these had been sanded down and given 6 coats of gloss mahogany wood stain. I used a piece of sticky backed felt on the underside and glued the resin base on top. This proved to be a little warped but fixable with plenty of glue (I watched most of an episode of Deep Space 9 while holding the bits together). I then drilled a hole in the base of Alvin and the central outcrop to take a piece of wire as a strengthening pin and glued them together. The nameplate was then glued to the base and voila - one finished kit.
I packed the finished kit in mounds of foam chips and drove it to my friend Dermot’s very carefully. It was delivered in the presence of Al Duester oceanographic engineer at Woods Hole, who has worked on the real thing. Dermot was very pleased and Al thought it gave a pretty good impression of the real thing.
All in all, and the various comments above notwithstanding, it's a very good kit of an unusual subject and with enough time and care builds into a very nice replica. I have heard that a injection molded Alvin may be available shortly, which, if it produces a model anywhere near as good as this one should be worth looking out for.

Tubeworms fronds are blood red.
Cameras and lights are primarily titanium with black plastic shrouds.
Most cameras and lights have oval glass pressure covers.
Wires are passed thought the outer hull which is a epoxy based material as required and then pass though connectors into the crew compartment.
Video cameras have a single lead for power and signal.

Kit specification:
1/35th scale resin multimedia kit
by Viking Models 16 of 250

Alvin details:
Length 23'4" Height 12' Gross weight 34,000 lbs.
Hull 82"
OD complement 3 persons

Water Baby - The Story of Alvin By: Victoria A. Kaharl
Publisher: Oxford ISBN 0-19-506191-8

Materials:-
Loctite Super Attak superglue
Pacer Zap-A-Gap CA+ gap filling superglue
Pacer Zap Kicker superglue accelerator
Microscale Micro Kristal clear

Paints:-
Humbrol:-
11 Silver
32 Matt Grey
33 Matt Black
34 Matt White
56 Aluminum
62 Matt Leather
85 Coal Black
130 Satin White
133 Satin Brown
Tamyia Colour;-
X-7 Gloss Red
Daler-Rowney acrylic inks