H.M.S. Bounty

Actually that's a good, accurate description.  To make it simpler - the knee of the head is the flat plastic piece that sticks out from the forward end of the hull.  (On the kit it's cast integrally with the hull.)  It winds up under the bowsprit, and the figurehead is mounted on the end of it.

To see the mistake that Revell made, you'll have to have a copy of the plans of the ship.  A good way to get them is to get John McKay's Anatomy of the Ship:  The Armed Merchant Vessel Bounty.  (I may have garbled the title slightly.)  In addition to Mr. McKay's own superb drawings, it contains photos of the Admiralty draughts.

If you compare the side view ("outboard profile") of the plans with the Revell kit, you'll see the difference immediately.  There's supposed to be a subtle S-curve to the forward edge of the knee of the head (that "handsome serpentine line or inflected curve" in the definition above) that Revell just plain botched.  I have no idea why that happened.

As I remember, I cut my replacement knee of the head out of either .060" or .040" styrene sheet, and scribed the edges of the various component pieces on it to match the "planks" I'd scribed on the hull halves.  (As I said in the first post in this thread, I'm not at all sure that using the plastic hull saved me any significant amount of time.)  

Replacing the knee of the head wasn't a huge job.  But if you leave it as is, I don't think anybody will mind.  I certainly won't.

Hope that helps a little.

That helps a lot, I've got the book and I will check the plans to see what I want to do.

I saw this in a magazine in the early 80s in a model shop  (I guess "Fine Scale Modeler" magazine). I bought the 2 issues but they fell apart over time. I been looking for the issues ever since. Do you know the issues the articles appeared in, so I can search for them?

By the way, I know the size of this Revell kit. It's small. The detail and workmanship are absolutely spectacular. I also like the fact that you went for realism. Most "plank-on-frame" models are super clean with pristine walnut planks, not like these ships probably looked only five years after being built. Sailing was a dirty and sometimes bloody business. SUPERB JOB!

TrioGio, I'm not quite sure what magazine articles you're referring to. I've never published an article in FSM. (Maybe one of these days....) I wrote a series about the Bounty that was published in the old British monthly Scale Models, in the fall of 1978.  As I remember, it was in three parts - but there may have been four.  A picture of the model was on the cover of the issue that carried Part I.  The printer somehow got the picture out of focus; the editor felt awful about it and ran a short extra article consisting only of color pictures, either three or four issues later. I can't remember whether that additional article was Part III or Part IV.

Scale Models was a fine publication in those days.  It was still being published in the mid-1990s, but for some reason it started really going downhill - especially when it came to subjects other than aircraft and armor. For a while it had the title Scale Models International. I don't know just when it ceased publication, but it's gone now. (I guess I should be careful with statements about that. I haven't seen a copy in the U.S. for years. Maybe it's still available in England. Or maybe it morphed into another title. The British have quite a few good modeling magazines.)

I have no idea where my copies of those articles are - let alone where to buy them. Sorry.

Thanks, I'll see if I can find them. The hobby store was in New York around 37th Street in the early 1980s. I didn't realize they were English. Again -- a beautiful model.

By the way, just to prove I had these, I remember you made the furled sails by mixing them with glue, which I thought was an ingenious way to get their detail in scale.

I'm deeply flattered, but I personally wouldn't spend much of my limited time on the Orb searching for copies of those 35-year-old magazines. Most of the text is covered by the posts in this thread, and the photos in this thread cover just about everything that the B&W ones in the magazines did. And of course I'll be more than happy to answer any questions.