Gorch Fock

I don't have the kit - and in fact haven't seen it in person. I did, however, take a look at the Revell Germany website, which has an interesting story to tell. I can't sort it out completely.

To begin with, it's important to bear in mind that there have been two German sail-training ships named Gorch Fock. The first one was built in the thirties, and was a near (but not identical) sister ship of the Horst Wessel, which later, of course, became the U.S. Coast Guard's training ship Eagle. That original Gorch Fock went to the Soviets as war reparations, and the last time I heard was still operating under the name Tovaritsch. The second Gorch Fock is much more recent (dating from the fifties or sixties, I believe). She was built for the West German Navy and, I believe, is still serving as the sail training ship of the new German Navy.

The Revell German catalog lists two Gorch Fock kits: one in 1/253 scale and one in 1/350 scale. I think the 1/350 one is a reboxing of the kit that originated with Imai in the late seventies. Imai did a rather large series of sail training ships, including, if I remember right, both Gorch Focks. They were pretty nice little kits, bearing in mind the limitations of the scale.

The 1/253 kit sounds suspiciously like a reboxing of the old classic Revell U.S.C.G.C. Eagle. (I can't imagine how else a kit would wind up in such a bizarre scale.) If so, it would be quite interesting. As we discussed a while back in this forum (in the thread labeled "Revell Eagle kit," which is now at the bottom of ship forum p. 5), this kit probably represents the Gorch Fock I more accurately than it represents the Eagle. If the Revell Germany folks made a few minimal changes (e.g., the figurehead and the decals), it ought to make a good start for a model. The painting on the website suggests that it has a double spanker gaff, so maybe it did get modified. It probably has some 1950s characteristics, like solid guard rails and those gawdawful plastic-coated "shroud and ratline assemblies," but the old Eagle was basically a nice kit, jam packed with character.

I believe Heller made a Gorch Fock II in 1/150, and it may well have appeared in a Revell box. I think I recall buying it once a long time ago, though I don't think I ever got around to building it. (Quite a few of my unbuilt kits got sold to a local hobby shop when I moved, after I got out of college; I think that may have been one of them.) My recollection is that it was a pretty nice, detailed kit.

All this is pretty confusing, and making my middle-aged head ache. Good luck. Modern sail training ships make nice models.

Academy has released a Fock in 1/350 which is supposed to be a sweet kit...I've never seen one in person, so it's second hand intel I'm passing on. There's also a Romanian training ship and a couple of others they've released as well.

Jeff

Those Academy kits appear to be reissues of the old Imai ones. Imai did a rather large range of 1/350 schoolships in the late seventies, when the "Tall Ships" (gawd I hate that term) craze was just past its peak. (It reached its zenith in 1976, when the "parade of tall ships" sailed into Newport, R.I. in conjunction with the U.S. Bicentennial.) They were nice kits - pretty small for sailing ship-type detail, but generally sound bases for good models. The original issues, I believe, were all waterline models; the company sold a "water mat" to display them. I think Academy has added underwater hulls.

It's great that these kits are available again. My only beef with Academy is its labeling of the U.S.S. [sic] Eagle. AARRGH!

I just browsed through the 43 ship model pages on E-Bay. (Great cure for insomnia.) There are quite a few of the old Imai 1/350 sailing school ships there - at (so far) quite reasonable prices. Also an old Revell Eagle, and several other interesting old plastic sailing ship kits.

So, that still begs the original question: Which Gorch Fock is the Revell Germany 1/150 scale kit? If it is the first one, it could be used to convert it to a USCGC Eagle. This would make the largest plastic model of Eagle- a lto bigger than the 1/253 revell kit, or the hard to find 1/200 scale Imai version..

-Bill

My personal bottom line answer: I don't know. It seems likely that the Revell Germany Gorch Fock is a reissue of the Heller kit, which is a handsome representation of the Gorch Fock II. And I'm pretty sure the Revell kit is fairly recent; it seems unlikely that the Revell designers would have picked a ship that had been given to the Soviets over an active German one. But not having seen the Revell one, I'm not sure.

Either Gorch Fock would make a handsome model. I personally wouldn't want to try to convert any kit of the Gorch Fock I into an Eagle. Stretching the hull would be mighty tricky - perhaps more difficult than building one from scratch. It's a shame there's not an accurate Eagle kit out there.

Having just taken another look at the Revell Germany online catalog, I need to retract and/or clarify some of what I said in my last post (and one of my earlier ones in this thread). There's no 1/150 Gorch Fock in that catalog. The scales of Revell Germany's two Gorch Fock's are 1/253 and 1/350.

The brief write-ups of the two kits assert that both of them represent the Gorch Fock II, which was launched (or, as one of those blurbs puts it, "lunched") in 1958. I haven't seen either kit in the box, but I have my doubts. It's pretty clear that the smaller one is a reboxing of an old Imai kit. My recollection (which may well be wrong) is that Imai did both a Gorch Fock I and a Gorch Fock II. How different those two kits were I don't know.

The written description of the 1/253 kit on the website is so weird that I have to wonder whether the individual who wrote it knew what he or she was talking about. It may be an old Eagle masquerading in the Gorch Fock II's color scheme, or it may be a relatively new kit. On the basis of the website I can't tell. It does seem unlikely that the company would use such an offbeat scale for any reason other than recycling the Eagle molds, but stranger things have happened.

Can't tell the answer to RCBoater's query without seeing the kits. Looks like I'm out of my depth on this one.

Bottom line: you can build a nice model of the Gorch Fock II from the Heller 1/150 kit, and probably a decent model of the Gorch Fock I by doing some relatively minor conversion work to the old Revell Eagle.

Converting the Gorch Fock I to an Eagle would be relativley easy-- they are sisterships, after all. In the late 1930s, Germany built the "five sisters". Here is where they ended up after the war:

Horst Wessel-- US-- USCGC Eagle
Gorch Fock-- Soviet Union- Tovarisch
Alber Leo Schlageter- first to Brazil, then to Portugal as Sagres II
Mircea- Romania
Herbert Norkus- UK- scuttled in the North Sea.

Maybe you meant it would be harder to convert a Gorch Fock II to an Eagle-- but I thought that the GF II was very similar to the original. As I understood it, West Germany built GF II in the late 1950s to replace the original, and that it is very similar to the original...

The problem with converting the Gorch Fock I to the Eagle is the difference in length. Those five German schoolships were near-sisters, but not identical. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, the Horst Wessel (later the Eagle) is about twenty feet longer than the Gorch Fock I (later the Tovarisch). They were quite similar - indeed, almost identical - in their rigs and deck layouts, and that twenty-foot difference was spread out over much of their lengths. I'd have to look at the respective deck plans, but I'm pretty sure the center sections don't have parallel sides. To lengthen the old Revell Eagle kit (which more accurately represents the Gorch Fock I) would be quite a project - far more than grafting a section from a second kit into the center.

We took up this interesting subject a few weeks ago, in a thread headed "Revell Eagle model." I've moved that thread to the first page; it should appear just below this one.

Let me emphasize again that I'm relying on my none-too-reliable memory for most of the details. But I'm confident about the basic point: the ships have different lengths, and Harold Underhill's drawings (on which, I'm pretty sure, virtually every Eagle kit has been based) actually represent the Gorch Fock I.

How important the discrepancy is should, of course, be for the individual modeler to determine. The difference in length isn't obvious in photos of the individual ships. But when the outboard profile drawing of the Eagle is compared with Underhill's the differences jump out pretty prominently. To build a model of the Gorch Fock I using the Revell Eagle, on the other hand, would be pretty simple - and produce a bit of a conversation piece.