A long-held ambition is finally being enacted. Having decided to 'dive in' and scratch build a model of the Typhoon submarine was one thing, but obtaining the skills needed and obtaining reliable data on the subject was quite another. There are Typhoon sub plans and indeed full model kits for sale at a price, but I wanted for the first time to start from a plan, and not spend a lot of money at the outset as it could all go very wrong. This meant trawling the internet for material, and there is some good stuff out there if you are prepared to search for long enough. A real Typhoon looks like this:

In the end, to augment what I’d found on the ‘net, I have bought a 1:350 model Typhoon kit, made by Chinese company Hobby Boss and a set of plastic measuring calipers. A U.S. internet site of particular note, www.rvjunkie.com/sub/ by John T. VanderHeiden discusses his scratch building of a 1:81 scale Typhoon, and the site very helpfully provides a copy of the plans he worked from, as well as a spreadsheet of measurements that he took from the plans, with scale equivalents in inches.

I decided to have a bit of double checking and take measurements from the plans and the 1:350 model and real life pictures, and iron out the differences before deciding on a ‘build’ measurement, knowing that with incomplete information, I can never be 100% accurate. As the RVjunkie plan is an image and I have printed it out on A4 paper, a European size, rather that American, I expected to arrive at slightly different measurements from those in John’s spreadsheet, and this proved to be the case. Another issue was that I was more comfortable with Millimetres, Centimetres, and metres, rather than feet and inches and so I am developing an updated spreadsheet giving as many measurements as possible, using the metric system. I will issue the table and update it as necessary, giving reasoning where applicable.

A 1:50 Typhoon model

After much internal wrangling I have decided to base my build around 1:50 measurements. There were many reasons for this, but the main ones were:
a) There are no Typhoon hulls available in 1:50, so I’d have no option but to scratch build (no cheating and buying a hull).
b) It’s big enough that I should be able to fix any mistakes on it without straining my eyesight.
c) A big sub should be BIG right?

Well this sub will be big enough, with a total length of just under 3.5 metres when fully built. I’m unsure at the moment of the final all-up dry and wet weights of this model, but suffice to say that I’ll likely need a hand to get it back out of the water once I’ve had my fun. The delivery, launch and recovery of the model will be a project of it's own, and I propose to build the sub in three sections that connect together at the waterside.

Budget is always a concern and so there will be a ‘phased’ development of this project. The phases comprise:
1. Build a set of 1:50 patterns for a fibreglass mould (hull and sail).
2. Take a mould from each of the patterns, and make the first hull and sail in fibreglass, for further development.
3. Build and sort out a surface running only sub, with working parts where able.
4. Make a second hull and sail (with all the lessons learned and tweaks incorporated) and set this up for dynamic diving and underwater testing.
5. Where possible re-engineer and carry out static dive tests.

Given the size of the project there will be many unique parts required for the build. Watch on here to follow progress.