IMAI versus Revell galleon kits compared/built.

Caveat:  I haven't built either of them, and I've never seen the Imai one outside the box.  But I did buy the Revell one once, and I'm somewhat familiar with both of them through pictures.  So I'll offer an opinion:  the Imai kit is a serious scale model.  The Revell one isn't.

The Revell kit was originally issued in the late 1970s.  (I'd have to check Dr. Graham's book, which I don't have in front of me here at the office, for the exact date.) [Later edit:  I checked the book; my memory was faulty again.  The kit was originally released in 1970.  Sorry about that.] That was a time when Revell was having some serious problems, financially; lots of people thought the company was on the verge of going bust.  I was working in a hobby shop at the time, and I vividly remember a piece of promotional literature we got about the Revell "Spanish Galleon":  "We've zeroed in on the market with this one:  young married couples and interior decorators."  Note the absence of any reference to scale ship modelers.  The appendix to Dr. Graham's book notes that the "research" for the kit was done in the MGM movie studio library.  That says a good deal.

The proportions of the hull are highly questionable, the proportions of the spars even moreso, and in general the...thing...looks like what it is:  a decoration for a mantlepiece in a household where nobody knows much, if anything, about ships.  I personally regard it as one of the more abominable creations of the plastic kit industry.

The Imai kit, on the other hand, gets rave reviews from just about everybody.  Most Imai kits do.  They're generally regarded as just about the best plastic sailing ship kits ever.

It needs to be acknowledged that the reliable primary sources about Spanish galleons are just about zilch; nobody really knows much about what ships looked like.  But the Imai interpretation is, to my eye at least, about the most reasonable-looking one that any model company has come up with.  Again, I haven't built it or even bought it.  But on the basis of what I know about it, I certainly recommend it in preference to the Revell kit.

I'm wondering still about how much can be deduced from work done on contemporary ships like Colombus' or the Mayflower or whatever from the Armada? Aren't there any contemporary paintings of such ships and extropolations that can be made? I remember hearing growing up that "noone knows how they were built" concerning triremes and now we have a full size replica and a book on the state of the archeological science pertainent to ancient marine architecture of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Carthegenians, etc.

It's certainly true that historians and archaeologists are constantly getting better at reconstructing old ships - and building full-sized reconstructions of them is, in some respects, the best way to find out about them.  (The reconstructed Greek trireme has led to all sorts of revisions in thinking about naval warfare in the age of the galley.)  But such efforts have there limits.  Contemporary pictures of ships from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries tend to be highly stylized - partly because few of the artists who drew them had a thorough understanding of perspective.  A few old Spanish and Portuguese texts on shipbuilding have turned up in the past few decades, and help somewhat.  And the famous "Matthew Baker Manuscript" tells us considerably more about English ships of the Armada period than we know about their Spanish counterparts.  Scholars certainly can reconstruct ships of that period with more confidence than they could, say, fifty years ago.

And just about every new piece of scholarship makes that Revell kit look worse.  (One small comfort:  in its later, modified reissue form as an "Elizabethan Man-of-War" it looks even worse.)  The Imai version surely would score much higher in any serious historian's estimation.  But the bottom line still is:  we just don't know for sure.

A gentleman by the name of Rod Millard  built the Lee 1/100 4-masted galleon. Images are on www.modelwarships.com and I recall them on Www.hyperscale.com

He does wonderful work in painting/weathering the plastic to appear as wood.  

 

Thanks Felix I have build two of the Imai Spanish Galleons. They are very nice models good detail. Extra work makes them very nice. They are four mast which was the earlier galleons .They later went to three mast.

Like Jtilley said the Revell Galleon is not as good a kit. I believe their scale is off also. the kit is listed at 1/96 but I believe it would be larger closer to 1/75 or so. The kit is little bit more toyish looking than the Imai. Again if you do some extra work you can make it look presentable.

Hope that helps a little.Yes my one Galleon is on www.modelwarships.com under Rod Millard.

Rod

I had both Revell kits a short while ago and really wanted to build them into something credible.  I bought every book I could find, studied every painting I could lay my hands onto, discussed the topic in this forum, and bought the Lee/Imai kit.  The Revell kits were unsatisfactory in nearly every way and I sold them on ebay.

I am very happy with the Lee kit!

Bill Morrison

I have the IMAI 4-masted galleon as well--I cut open the lower gun deck port holes , added a lower gun deck , and added cannon on one side before setting it aside--hope to get back to it someday.