airfix Royal Sovriegn

Hi all well back off hols and made a tentative start on this one

http://i.imgur.com/B5WyJd5.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/rJabqtM.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Mv2SATH.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/WCtvjF6.jpg

The kit comes with stubby half cannons for the lower decks( I may live to regret this but Ive decided to open up the gun ports and make some whole guns to put behind them, since they are below decks and you wont see much of them they wont need to be too detailed or accurate, and I am only doing one side as they would never do a broadside on both sides, I mean what admiral in his right mind would choose to take the risk of a broadside on both sides at the same time) also it means I've only got to make 30 guns and carriages. I also have to make part decks for one side.

http://i.imgur.com/ASzuhCp.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/HTF40ha.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/34NWDqI.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/AoMynZ7.jpg

There is one detail about that kit that I really appreciate.  There are no wood or plank engravings on the exterior hull.  I have often found that plastic kit manufacturers overstate the planking on sailing ships when these details should actually be minimized, especially in the small scales of the kits.  I know that when I observe real sailing ships like the Charles Morgan in Mystic, I hardly see the hull planking, and I certainly do not see the wood grain on those planks. Therefore, I tend to sand my hulls down to minimize the effect.

This observation has helped me in building the Le Superbe and Le Glorieux by Heller, which molded on the wood grain but no planks. The Sovereign of the Seas/Royal Sovereign by Airfix, to me, got it right.

Bill Morrison

Well we arrived safely in Egypt.  

I know what you mean, it's not as if all they had to do was recreate the mouldings they had to.work out how to do it in such a way as to get it out of the injection process as well, I don't think we have the skills as good today as we had then, without computers nowadays they would be lost.

Yes machine skills are a memory now. I was just reading Burns' forward to his book "The War". He was describing Waterbury CT as the brass capital of the world. Everyone employed there could work at 0.0001", and quite a few at "zero" tolerance if needed.

I chalk that up to marketing .

    Even today the folks in marketing haven't a clue about what they are doing . Never did .

You Know ;

      I have that kit and some others in my stash . I was always intrigued by the moldings compared to what we have today .

     It seems that many have been called but few have served . Engravers I mean . Can you imagine being the guy or team of guys engraving that mold ?

   I can't be helped being impressed . My Foster dad was a tool and die maker and his work was incredible even back in the fifties . Imagine how I felt when he showed me how to make a mold to create a sand casting .

    Then he explained the whole process on " Bring Your Children " day at the plant . His office was a shrine to detail that always stuck with me .

   These ships keep bringing back those memories to me . They can look grand even being " OLD " in terms of when they were new and fabulous .       Tanker - Builder

One thing that's always puzzled me about that kit is the name. The ship was commissioned in 1637 with the name Sovereign of the Seas. She had a long, active career, and two name changes: she was renamed Sovereign in 1651 and Royal Sovereign in 1685 (on the eave of the Glorious Revolution). She underwent a major rebuild in the 1660s, emerging from it with the official label "ship of the line." Not a whole lot seems to be known about her in the way of details, but there are several contemporary paintings of her at various points in her career. It's pretty clear that during that 1660s refit the bow structure was extensively redesigned and rebuilt; she came out of the refit looking quite different than she had originally. And that was twenty years or so before she was renamed Royal Sovereign.

I'm no expert on seventeenth-century English warships, but it certainly looks to me like the Airfix kit represents the ship as she was built. So it seems to me that the model ought to be labeled Sovereign of the Seas.

Arthur Ward's The Boy's Book of Airfix (I really don't like that title) says it was one of Airfix's first two sailing ships (the other being the Endeavour). Both, according to Mr. Ward, were originally released in 1963. Considering its age, it's a mighty nice kit.

My plan is to drill out the gun ports on one side(they would only do a broad side on one side) then make a false deck and guns for those decks, that's the plan anyway

It's a grand old kit - though an old one. My only two real criticisms: there's no detail on the inside of the bulwarks, and the guns below the weather decks are "dummies" that plug into those shallow square depressions. I'd suggest gluing the gunports closed.

The potential definitely is there for a fine model.