1/144 Captain Nemo’s First Nautilus (Pegasus)

I was nine years old in 1954 when Walt Disney Studios released it’siconic production of Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”, which remained one of my favorite movies for years. I waited in vain, however, for the expected release of the Revell model of the movie submarine Nautilus. There must have been a failure tocommunicate on a licensing agreement. I think this would have been one of Revell’s top sellers.

In 2014 the Pegasus Models 1/144 kit hit the shelves. The extravagant (and totally infeasible) High Victorian design of the salon windows and the “spar torpedo” ram grabbed me immediately. I saw this design as much more primitive than the Disney sub, so I decided that this must be Nemo’s first attempt, to be replaced later by a more practical and sturdy design for a submarine ram. Since Nemo wished his ship to be mistaken for a Sea Monster, I decided to depart from the usual rusty steel finish and paint the model like an ocean fish with dark dorsal, white ventral and graded blue sides.

At the time I was also looking for a project to explore the totally unfamiliar technology of LED lighting. I remembered a NOVA program on the luminescent lighting of deep sea creatures and decided to try toadd a flashing “lateral line” of white dots. I found a product with a 5mm LED connected to 32 fiberoptic light fibers and used two of these, one facing forward and one aft. After drilling the holes and threading all the fibers out through the holes I melted the tipof each fiber into a small “lens”, put a drop of CA glue in thehole, and pulled the fiber back tight against the hull. These were wired through a flashing unit to produce a rapid flash effect. I also placed green LEDs behind the side lights flanking the salon and abright “headlight” atop the bridge. The base and the squid comewith the kit. I dremelled out a trench in one of the tentacles tohide the wire from the batteries in the base to the LEDs

The kit comes with a very nice interior of both the salon and the bridge.I finished these with Preisser “N” gauge figures of “Mariners” to represent bridge crew and Capt. Nemo, Prof. Arronax and Ned Landin the salon.

This turned out to be a lot of fun and learning. I can’t find most of the sources of LED lighting ideas, but this is one place to start.

Gallery updated 10/14/2020

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