Leonardo Da Vinci Submarine

[whitestar12chris]

Up for RFI is a 1/16 scale plastic kit of Leonardo Da Vinci's submarine design based on sketches in his notebooks.

 

Of note is it is unclear if this was used as there was mysterious sinking of Turk ships during a campaign involving Leonardo, wether it was his submarine or his diving suit that was used is not known from what i could find out on the web.

 

Heres a link to the WIP thread 

The model is a snap fit kit but i did glue mine. Hand painted in Vallejo acrylics with a black wash to enhance the grain effect moulded ito the plastic made it a very enjoyable build.

The dive planes had handles to angle them, rudder was steered by rope through a pivoting handle up front and propulsion was by moving pedals up and down with your feet, almost in a walking motion which raised and lowered a pair of flippers through a wooden gearbox at the rear.

 

So heres some photos of the finished build;

 

 

Bow                                                                                                          Stern

 

 

Rear gearbox, with flippers and pedals.                                                                                                                                           Forward controls for dive planes and rudder, the pilot would lie prone on the chest pad.

 

This kit is widely available sold by many manufacturers such as Italeri, Revell, Doyusha, Edu-toys and so on. This example was from i believe a polish source.

 

All the best Chris

[Bitzer]

What a neat little kit. Great job on it.

[beefy66]

Very nice job on this great build Chris and a small history lesson to boot 

 

Would not have wanted to be the bloke trying this out though looks to much like hard work for me. 

 

beefy 

[huvut76g7gbbui7]

That's a wee bit different and very nice it is too.

Richard

[Gimme Shelter]

this is a very nice and well made model - quite brilliant and a delight to browse over

[stevej60]

That's excellent Chris,great to see something so different too!

[seadog]

Cool! Love the mad propulsion system!

[Gerrardandrews]

brilliant looking model , wouldn't want to have used the real one, great historical lesson as well 😊