If you are building the Lindberg Jolly Roger, Read

Those are some very nice references. The internet is great. I didn't have it when I built my Lindberg kit so I used "The 32 gun Frigate" by Potia Takakjian for color references. However, all the lines were British and no French. But hey, the ship I was building, HMS Undine, 32 Capt. Richard Bothilo, never really existed so I wasn't too afraid of being too accurate.

Thanks,
Scott

Hi scottrc,

I won't be starting the kit for at least a month. I was wandering how well it fits together?

Any problems I'll be facing?

Thanks for any help,
Lon

The overall fit is good and so is the detailing. I did have some gaps when mating the stern up to the hull. The only thing I would do differently would be to replace to topmasts and spars with wood. The kits are weak and make it so I had to make constant adjustments to the rigging. My topsails always look out of trim.
Scott

Hi -

Way back in the 1960s, Lindberg produced a couple of sailing ship kits that I think may have been of European (German, perhaps) origin. One was the two-deck German ship of the line Wappen von Hamburg; the other was the French eighteenth-century frigate La Flore. They weren't bad kits, as such things went in those days. If I remember correctly, they had the usual wretched vacuum-formed "sails," but their "shroud and ratline" assembiles were far superior to the awful plastic-coated thread ones that Revel and Airfix were offering at the time. The Lindberg ones were molded in flexible plastic, engineered in such a way that they stretched a little bit when they were installed. Both kits were also unusual in that they included complete carriages for the guns, even on the lower decks, and a considerable number of rather stylized crew figures. The two kits weren't on the market long in their original boxes. I suspect the company was hoping that the La Flore kit would be popular because President Kennedy had a model of that vessel in his collection, but sales apparently weren't good.

The two have been re-released several times under different names; if I remember right, for a brief and unmemorable period they were being molded in phosphorescent plastic and marketed as "glow in the dark ghost ships." At the moment, the Wappen von Hamburg is being sold as "Captain Kidd," and La Flore as "Jolly Roger."

What you've got, in other words, is a reasonably accurate, 1960s-vintage reproduction of an eighteenth-century French frigate.

If you want to find out more about La Flore (she has an interesting history), I believe a set of plans is available from Taubman Plans Service - which, I believe, also carries a set of plans for the Wappen von Hamburg. (Taubman Plans Service is a one-man operation, run by a remarkable character named Abe Taubman. You can make contact with that source by way of the web page for Ships in Scale magazine: www.seaways.com. Be warned, though: the Taubman website doesn't include anything like his whole line of plans. If you really want to see what he's got, order his printed catalog.) Another excellent source of info on the French navy of the period is the series of beautifully-illustrated books by Jean Boudriot - hugely expensive, but available through good libraries (and Inter-Library Loan). Boudriot hasn't written a book specifically about La Flore, but his other works contain a tremendous amount of material about French ships of the period - and are great fun to look at.

Hope this is of at least a little help.

Best,
J.A. Tilley

Well, I've decided not to try and make the Jolly Roger into the HMS Surprise :(

Go to this link and you'll see that the Surprise was originally the Le Unite and the stern looks different.

http://www.modelships.co.uk/Models/HMS_Surprise/hms_surprise.html

I will build it as the La Fore since the kit is of this ship.

Thanks for the info jtilley.

Lon

In the book, I thought the Surprise was a sixth rate and not a fifth. 24 guns and not 32. That website confirms my suspicion.

Hi -

When I got home last night I checked the Taubman plans catalog. It does offer sets of plans for both the Wappen von Hamburg and La Flore. The ones for La Flore are part of a series from the Musee de la Marine in Paris; I've never worked with any of them myself, but they have an excellent reputation. The catalog doesn't indicate the source of the Wappen von Hamburg plans, but the small-scale reproduction looks quite good.

Both those old Lindberg kits are definitely worth some time and effort. My recollection (which is pretty hazy; I haven't looked at either of them up close for many years) is that the "wood grain" detail was a bit heavy-handed, but the carved ornamentation, guns, and other details were really nice. I do agree with another member of this forum that it would be a good idea to replace the plastic spars with wood ones. Plastic is a marvelous material for model building, but it does have its limitation; its flexibility makes it lousy for masts and yards.

J. Tilley