Don Stauffer
I had been considering that Cutty Sark kit. With your comments and the neat deck kit, looks like I will have to pick up one!
Lest I be misconstrued as promoting either the kit or the wood deck set - I do have a few reservations.
In the first place, as I mentioned earlier, the butt joints on the deck set are wrong. They're arranged in a "two-step" pattern, with a joint in every other plank over every deck beam. That was illegal in 1869; Lloyd's of London required that there be at least two uninterrupted planks between every pair of butt joints on a given beam. Whether that's an important error or not is, of course, up to the individual modeler.
It looks like the manufacturer did make an effort to get the "joggled" margin planks right. (That frees the modeler from an extremely tricky job.) And the inked lines don't look too heavy. It does look like the wood itself (basswood?) is a little fuzzy, but a thin coat of highly dilluted white shellac should fix that (unless, gawd forbid, it dissolves the ink).
Those vertical planks on the break of the poop are nonsense. I have no idea whether Academy provides a part for the paneled bulkhead that ought to be there, but it's quite simple; any decent modeler should be able to make it out of plastic sheet in less than half an hour.
The photos on the Freetime website do remind me of a couple of goofs in the kit that I spotted in earlier photos - both of them repeated from the Imai 1/125 kit. (Coincidence?) The two grooves in the white cover of the "booby hatch" demonstrate how the designers misinterpreted the George Campell drawings of it. (It could be fixed with plastic sheet in a few minutes.) And this kit, like the Imai one, messes up the cargo winches. Campell provides one drawing to cover both of them, and shows a cable lifter on one end. Below the drawing are two notes: "Both ends thus on forward winch" and "Both ends thus on after winch." Apparently the Japanese (or Korean) designers knew how to read drawings, but not how to read the English language. This calls for two swipes of an Xacto knife and a couple of drops of glue, so the forward winch has two cable lifters and the after winch none.
I fell in love a long time ago with the Imai kit; in my opinion it's the most accurate model of the ship I've seen, plastic, wood, or otherwise. (I bought one on my first trip to England in 1978, and paid to have it shipped to Ohio because it wouldn't fit in my suitcase. I guess it disappeared in a later change of residence - though, come to think of it, it just may be somewhere in the attic.) It looks to me like the Academy one is, if not identical, at least in the same ballpark. I should emphasize again that I'm basing my comments entirely on photos; I've never held the kit in my hands. But I confess that, like Mr. Stauffer, I'm thinking about seeking it out.