1/481 Revel USS Helena Review/Preview

What a bizarre scale.

The Helena is a box-size scale. Revell used to manufacture ship kits not to any specific scales but to fit standard sized boxes. Oh, well . . .

That's the headache with Revell ships, all those different scales. Makes it impossible to find PEs to match the right size, like the Revell 1/570 scale King Geoge.

It is actually quite easy to find PE for the 1/570 King George just simply round the scale up to 1/600 scale. Just use the PE for the Airfix 1/600 scale King George White Ensign Gold Medal Models and Toms Model Works make PE for the Airfix kit.

Bissyboat

That's the headache with Revell ships, all those different scales. Makes it impossible to find PEs to match the right size, like the Revell 1/570 scale King Geoge.

"Box scale" was common to companies other than Revell. Thankfully it's largely dead now, other than re-issues.

I've always been a bit confused by "box scale."  If a 1:481 Helena fits in a box, so would a 1:500 model.  I think the Baltimore class cruisers were 673.5" length overall, so the 1:500 model would only be about 5/8 of an inch smaller and I would think that 1:500 would be much easier for the machinists who made the mold to work with than 1:481. So why 1:481?

And looking at the Revell re-issues that I have (excluding RofG, since they have their own packaging), no two boxes are the same size - even for ships of roughly comparable size and scale (Burton Island and Roger Taney)!

I'm guessing that there is something other than box size involved here.  Maybe someone on the FSM staff will take a shot at this.

Interesting.  At this point I suspect we can only speculate.  

I think Carmike is right:  as I remember (which, for my Halfzeimer's- afflicted brain, isn't easy), those Revell warship kits from the fifties and sixties came in a wide variety of box sizes.  I think the sailing ships (what I grew up thinking of as the $3.00 series - the Constitution, Santa Maria, Bounty, Victory, Flying Cloud, Eagle, etc. - did originally come in boxes that were the same size.  I can't remember much about the company's airplane kits, but I don't think their boxes were universally standardized either.  I may well be mistaken about that, though.

I can speak to one particular example.  When I was in grad school (about 35 years ago) I was rummaging through old copies of the periodical The Mariner's Mirror in the university library and came upon (in one of the 1936 or 1937 issues, I believe) an article about H.M.S. Bounty.  It contained foldout copies of the Admiralty draughts of the ship - in scales that fit the paper on which the magazine was printed.  I xeroxed one of the drawings, took it home, and compared it to the Revell kit.  They were a perfect match; the scale worked out to 1/110.

Coincidence?  Well, maybe so.  I do know that at that time Revell had an incredible pantograph machine that did a brilliant job of reducing and enlarging parts - presumably from the hand-made masters.  (There are several instances of parts - figures, for instance - showing up in different scales in Revell kits - but otherwise identical.  And the masters for those figures in the old Bounty kit simply could not have been carved on 1/110 scale.)  My guess is that the masters for virtually all the old Revell kits were made on a larger scale and "pantographed down."  But that's just intuition; I have no documentation to reinforce it.  And if all the masters were pantographed down to make the kits, how did the Bounty end up (a) on a weird, non-standardized scale, and (b) exactly the same size as that print in the Mariner's Mirror?

What does seem clear is that the people at Revell in those early years assumed that their purchasers didn't care much about standardized scales.  Given the company's success, I guess that must have been true. 

Another possibility:  somewhere along the line some plain old sloppiness slipped into the process.  I think the first generation of Revell warships were based on a series of "modeler's drawings" that the Navy sold, as a PR exercise, in the first few years after WWII.  I've seen some of those drawings; they're pretty crude and basic - largely, presumably, because the actual plans of the ships were still classified at the time.  If the kit designer working from one of those drawings intended to make a cruiser kit to 1/500 scale, it wouldn't take much of a mistake (in those days before photocopiers, and before one could change the scale of a drawing by punching buttons on a machine) to shrink it a little by accident. 

All that is, of course, speculation and idle rumination on my part.  I wonder if enough of the "old hands" at Revell are still around that we could find out.  I suspect the first-hand knowledge of just how the company's design process worked is all gone now.

John:

Thanks.  Don't worry about the "Halfzeimers" - I think we all have it.

I actually used (or attempted to use) a pantograph machine during the dark ages of mechanical drawing (before there were CAD systems and scanners), and a lot depended on the skill of the draftsman who traced the original drawing while the remote arm produced the copy (which could be enlarged, reduced, or the same size).  If the objective was to produce a 1:480 scale model (which, as I think about now)  probably would have been more likely than 1:500 in the pre-metric 12" to the foot days (and 1:480 just happens to be a nice and even 40' to the inch) - then they came extremely close.

The Arizona kit scales out at 1:428 - the nearest multiples of 12 are 420 (1" = 35') and 432 (1"=36) - so it makes you wonder if the objective was to produce a 1:432 kit and it just came out undersize.  I wonder though what compelled them to produce the United States, Queen Mary, Titanic, and Oriana at 1:570?

Perhaps we'll be lucky and there might be someone who worked for Revell in Venice, CA as a summer employee, etc., who might have some insight.

Best,

Mike

I have a few of the latest release Arizona in the stash, and I'm here to tell ya, the box is twice the size it needs to be........

The kit's still as crisp and clean as ever though...

Interestingly, the issue of "box scale" isn't dead.  In my many emails to Airfix , who, in my humble opinion, was the original leader in standard scale modeling early on, about manufacturing new sailing ship kits to a standard scale, their constant response was that they could not manufacture to a constant scale because of box size.  Yet, they have no difficulties producing aircraft to 1/72 scale, tanks to both 1/72 and HO scale, modern and WWII ships to both 1/600 and 1/350 scale, but their sailing ships are shotgunned all over the place based on box size.

I'm wondering if it was a bit of a hold-over from changing from wooden kits to plastic.  Things that are "hot" cast shrink after casting.  So, any moulds or dies you use must needs be larger than the final product.

It's about 7% for metals; about 4% for ceramics--injection-moulded thermoplastic no doubt has a similar percentage.  And, that percentage might not have been as well known in the beginnings of the model industry.  Or, it was that no one told the people drafting the mould/die dimensions to care.

Or, could have been  corporate expediency--the drawings are this size, make the dies to that size, when the parts cool, they'll be proportionate, and  that's "to scale" of a sort.

Whatever their reason, it just seems that, if they could produce entire series of aircraft, tanks, and WWII surface ships to a standard scale, then it should be no problem producing sailing ships to a standard scale.

Bill