Soda bottle submarine/dirigible main hull

[Florida Diver]

Tonight I played around with an idea I've had for some time.
I'd been thinking about how much a plastic soda bottle looked like the body of a submarine or even a dirigible. So I decided to try gluing some of them together to form a long enough hull to scratch build a submarine of my own design.

First I cut the label and carefully pulled it off and removed the very sticky label glue from the bottle with lighter fluid. There was a slight mold seam going around my bottle a few inches from the bottom of the bottle. I cut the bottle at that seam and glued it to another bottle like this.....



I then cut the bottom off of the other bottle but made sure I cut more towards the bottom past the slight mold seam where the bottle just barely started to taper. Then I cut the bottom off of another bottle at the same seam I've described. Since the bottom of where one bottle was slightly tapered where I cut it, it fit very tightly into the bottom of the other bottle I glued to it. Remember to cut your bottle so the tapered bottom of one of them fits inside the non tapered cut you did on the other bottle.

So what I had now was two bottles in the middle cut and glued cut bottom to cut bottom, and then another bottle glued over the tops of both those bottles. Using four bottles in all. It comes out to about 28 and 1/2 inches in length and looks like this.....



The glue is all on the inside of the bottles. I plan to cover the ever so slightly overlapping seams (it's already a really tight fit with the tapered bottle section jammed into the other bottle's non tapered section) with strips of paper that when glued and with small fake rivets will look like external metal hoops riveted to connect the sub's hull sections.

If you want a shorter submarine or dirigible body, just use less bottles. Here's what it looks like just using three bottles instead of four.....



I also saved the strips I cut out of the bottle and also saved the bottoms of the bottle for possible use. To make the bottom pieces perfectly trimmed, I set them on their bottoms and tightly holding a laundry marker I spun the bottoms to create a perfectly round line around them which I then cut with scissors. I laid these aside for later possible use. Here's a couple of pics of that....





I might use those bottle bottoms later as observation windows or even as part of the upper superstructure or conning towers.

I plan to next make a paper upper deck and then we will see where it goes from there. A project in the works working from scratch without plans, so it will probably take a little time. I'll update this thread as I get more done.
But I just wanted to see how using soda bottles would work out for building a submarine or dirigible body since I had been thinking about this for some time and finally decided to try it and see how it works out.

[peter taft]

Seems to be an interesting media to work with, and you are right - the shape does lend itself to this subject. Will you be covering the bottles with paper strips or paper pulp ? Look forward to seeing how this pans out.

[airdave]

plastic! plastic! plastic!
heathen! heathen! heathen!



hey this might work for making some canopies

[Florida Diver]

Originally Posted by peter taft

Seems to be an interesting media to work with, and you are right - the shape does lend itself to this subject. Will you be covering the bottles with paper strips or paper pulp ? Look forward to seeing how this pans out.

I won't be covering the complete bottles with paper, just the seams with paper strips. I'm looking forward to seeing how it pans out too. I've never tried this before, but it seemed like a cheap and good idea to at least try.

[Florida Diver]

Originally Posted by airdave

plastic! plastic! plastic!
heathen! heathen! heathen!



hey this might work for making some canopies

Hee hee. But yes you are right. The clear plastic from the cheap soda bottles will be excellent for making canopies, windows, portholes, etc. If you need a formed canopy, just make either a clay or a balsa wood (make sure you fill the balsa's pores so the plastic won't glue itself to the balsa) shape of the canopy you want, lay a section of plastic over it and hit it with a heat gun being careful not to bubble the plastic from too much heat. The plastic will lay down over your form. Let it cool to harden and then trim the edges and you have a formed canopy for your plane or whatever. A soda bottle that you would just throw away, a bit of clay or balsa and your heat gun. Can't get much less expensive than that. Kind of like using a vacu-form but without the vacuum.
Actually this is the same technique I have seen used to make large round protruding windows and real airplane canopies too. You'd just be doing it in miniature.

[Florida Diver]

Today I didn't do much on my plastic bottle creation, but I DID hacksaw off the end cap of it so it is rounded on the end now where I can glue paper over the hole. Looks like this.....



Look how much Simon Lake's Argonaut looks like two or maybe three soda bottles glued together. Compare these pics of the Argonaut with me holding three soda bottles glued together which looks like it would make a very close hull for an Argonaut model.





Three bottles glued before I added the fourth section.


But since I glued FOUR bottle sections together, it is too long now to make a hull for the Argonaut......



Sooo.....I was thinking of maybe using it to make something similar but not necessarily exactly like this fictional Victorian sub......



You'll notice that the stern and main body of this sub looks just like my four soda bottles glued together. The only problem I have is I don't have another rendering of the bow to see what it looks like. I've looked all over the net and cannot find the name of the artist to contact that did this rendering to find out if he did another rendering of its bow. And I cannot find another view of this sub besides just this one pic. So I am leaning towards making a sub that looks like this, but will probably have to extrapolate from what I can see as to what the bow should look like. But look carefully at the stern, doesn't it look a lot like the nose of my bottle after I cut the cap end off? And the overall length looks about the same as my four bottles glued together. Do you think this one would be a good sub pick to make my soda bottles into?


.

[treadhead1952]

Hi FD,

Looks like you may be on to something there. If you had a plastic welder set up you could fix that little hole in the front and rear from chopping the bottle necks off and make things water proof again. Being a sucker for steam punk lookin' things like that submarine you have a picture of, I would have to say full steam ahead to this project.

[Wyvern]

Really clever idea, FD!

Wyvern (also an FD).

[Retired_for_now]

Nice idea so far - I found that bottles also make good stiffeners when building really large cylinders (big ISS). You can cut off the ends to leave just the central cylinder, then slice lengthwise. Slip inside the paper tube and it'll expand to stiffen the assembly. Makes a very light-weight part.
Yogi (I know it's plastic, but I really didn't want 10 feet of ISS dropping on some random student's head ...)

[Florida Diver]

Originally Posted by Wyvern

Really clever idea, FD!

Wyvern (also an FD).

Thanks Wyvern. Glad you liked it. Great to hear from another Florida diver.
I'm in Hudson, Fl. Where in Florida are you?



.