Aurora ship kits

Well where do I start.First off on Ebay these kits go for a lot of money.The main kits that attract the most attention are the Wandering Whaler,The Bonhomme Richard,and The USS Hartford.Althought they are hard to come by they are not very good kits compared to todays kits.They have no particular scale they worked from.Mainly box scale wereas the manufactor made the model to it a certain size box.For there day they fit a purpose and sales niche.Of the three kits the Wandering Whaler is most realistic.Aurora also had some smaller ships but they weren't much better.If you can get them for a small price i would then unload them on Ebay.
Rod

Rod,

I have the Wander Whaler and am considering putting it on ebay what do you think it might go for?

Jake

you can try this link:

http://www.oldmodelkits.com./aurora.html

and see what's available and the prices they go for... I looked up the LPH model they had on there and while not horrible it isnt quite detailed or accurate... still though it is one of the only names inthe game for amphibs and it did represent the lines of the ship if not the entirety.

Big Jake: you can probably find the kit on that site as well and see what is worth retail... then decide what you might decide to offer it for on ebay...

Whoa, great site!

Jake

I have fairly clear (but by no means infallible) memories of the Wanderer, Hartford, Bonhomme Richard, and one other kit: the Sea Witch. (The latter was a modified reissue of an old ITC kit; it's since been reboxed by Lindberg, and still turns up occasionally in hobby shops.) In general I agree with the other participants: these weren't bad kits for their day, but they show their age.

From the serious modeler's standpoint they had one enormous drawback: the "sails" were injected-molded plastic, about four scale inches thick, and molded integrally with the yards. Apart from the fact that "sails" made that way are almost by definition disastrously unrealistic, some of those Aurora ones were downright weird. If I remember right, those of the Wanderer were remarkably similar to those of the Revell Thermopylae. The Revell ones were vacuum-formed, so such things as the "seams" in the "sail" were convex on the front and concave on the back. If my recollection is correct (as it may not be), the Aurora injection-molded "sails" had those same features.

Those kits, I believe, came out in the mid-sixties. Prior to that time Aurora made a few other sailing ships. There was a rather nice little War of 1812 privateer schooner called the Corsair, a small Cutty Sark (not so nice), and a Chinese Junk (which has shown up under half a dozen other labels). Then there were two from the real Dark Ages of the plastic kit business: the completely fictitious "Black Falcon Pirate Brig" and every elementary school kid's favorite: the Viking Ship. I don't remember how many times I built that one - complete with its horned crewmen and "oilcloth" sail (with red and white stripes printed on one side). It bore virtually no resemblance to a real Viking ship, but in those days nobody noticed - or cared. Kits like that undoubtedly stirred up the initial glimmerings of interest in lots of kids (including this one) who later dived more deeply into the subject of maritime and naval history.

Such reminiscences are fun for us senile Olde Tymers, and for collectors of obscure kits. But it would take a great deal of work to make an Aurora sailing ship kit into a reasonably accurate scale model by modern standards.

my eyes widened when i saw the prices in the link from tom' post. who needs to find rare pennies in pockets of old jackets when you can ask 350 bucks for an old kit !

I just noticed the Aurora Hartford on e-bay. The latest bid was $103. Seems like a lot for a so-so kit but I guess there is some collector value to someone. I've seen people place '78 and '79 cars in the "classic and antique" newspaper ads at outrageous prices. I figured if it's not at least 40-50 years old it's not a "classic" car. But then I also was shocked to see the Hartford going for $165 at the oldkits web site. One man's junk is another man's treasure.

I remember those old Aurora kits too! I built that old Black Falcon Pirate Brig too!! Man what memories! That thing sailed many a year in our backyard pool until it became too damaged to go on. Then it was sunk in my fish tank as a decoration. The fish loved it!

Aurora was also the first company that I know of to model a modern Russian warship. I remember my mother buying the Aurora Moskva helicopter carrier for me to give another kid for his birthday. Boy how I begged her to get me one! Finally, eight months later, she finally did!

Ah, the memories! By today's standards, they were horrble klits, but man did they ever make this young kid happy!

That ol boy on that website is mighty proud of those prices.

The bottom of a fish tank is a good place for that "Black Falcon." Now that the nostalgia gears are turning...Aurora also made a series of warships, most of them on 1/600 scale (more or less). Let's see...there was an Iowa-class battleship (looked a lot like the ancient Revell one, but a bit smaller), a Baltimore-class cruiser, a Fletcher-class destroyer (bigger scale than the others), and the Enterprise (CV-6 - a particularly blah model, with three unrecognizable aircraft on the deck). Then there were some foreign vessels: the Graf Spee, King George V, Yamato (the only Japanese warship kit available in this country for a long time), and a very popular Type IX U-boat. And a real oddity: a destroyer whose box said "U.S.S. Radford - Fletcher-class Destroyer." The contents, however, vaguely represented a Sumner-class ship, with a catapult and an aircraft (which none of that class ever carried). And one of the rarest of all ship kits: the German Q-ship Atlantis.

My vague recollection is that there was sort of a "second generation" of Aurora warships, which were a good bit better than the first. In addition to the Moskva that Duke Maddog mentioned, I think there was a U.S.S. Guadalcanal, and a Japanese submarine. Oh, and a few of American subs: the Nautilus (designed before the Navy had released any drawings of the prototype), the Seawolf (same kit), and the Skipjack (complete with nuclear reactor, which could be viewed through a removable hatch). I think I saw that one fairly recently in a Monogram box.

It's weird how the post-middle-aged memory cells work. I wish I could recall genuinely important stuff (like the meetings I have to go to next week) the way I seem to be able to remember ridiculous trivia like this.

I noticed that no one mentioned their A/C carrier kits. I remember building the USS INDEPENDENCE with the really poor representations of jet a/c. Infact, I still have that ship and the planes that go onto the flightdeck.

Splash32 is right, of course. I think I remember three identical kits, labeled Forrestal, Saratoga, and Independence. (Maybe there was a Ranger too; I don't remember.) They came out at almost the same time as the Revell Forrestal - about the time the ship was commissioned, I guess. I remember those blobby Aurora aircraft, too. As I recall they were molded in a pale grey plastic (lighter than the medium grey of the ship), and knocked around the box in their own plastic bag. They did have one virtue over their Revell counterparts (from the standpoint of a ten-year-old): there were more of them.

Then, of course, there was that three-foot-long Enterprise, with its separate motorizing kit. That one was totally beyond my reach: it cost somethinge over $5.00.

I now realize, of course, that most of these kits were, in scale modeling terms, junk. But they were part of the big, wonderful modeling picture that roped so many of us in during the fifties and sixties. Model building doesn't have the ability to do that to kids any more, I'm afraid. When I go into a hobby shop (assuming I can find one) these days I see scarcely any kids. They're all home playing with their computers or playstations. I have to wonder where the next generation of modelers - and hobbiests of any kind, for that matter - will come from.

The next generation will come from those of us with kids, and those friends of theirs who love looking at the work our kids do. Even if they leave the Hobby, our kids will remember the great times they had building with Dad, (or Mom) and will one day return to it.

The next generation will come from the After School clubs that some people form for kids who want to try something different than the usual after school sports. I helped set up a model club at one elementary school, and on sign up day at the beginning of the year, there were 67 names! We had to break it into three groups all meeting on different days. At the end of the school year, there were still 61 kids still attending regularly

The next generation is among us now: rebelreenactor, dubix88, ddayomaha, ShermanFirefly, t3488g, ArmorMaster, reggiethedorf, M1abramsRules, scubaboy99, jay_liang_CA, wooverstone8, Frosty, Akuma, Tena, fightinjoe's two boys....

I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

jtilley, you posted what I believe are the thoughts of many of us model building "baby boomers". I'm 56 yrs old but I still clearly recall the excitement of taking pop bottle deposit money or a dollar I made mowing a couple of lawns down to my local hobby shop. I have a 16 year old son and 14 year old daughter (I started late in life) and neither of them have any interest in anything related to model building. I prefer to go to the one decent local hobby shop alone. If they were with me we would spend 15 minutes in the hobby shop and an hour in a video game/computer store.

This tech generation seems uninterested in hobbies or crafts requiring use of the mind and hands. There aren't many hobby shops or wood working stores around any more. When I was young we used our imaginations and stuff from the garage and built pirate ships and rocket ships and "go-carts". We saw "The Bucaneer" at the theater (20 cents for Saturday matinee) and acted the whole thing out while walking home (yes kids we got up and walked). We didn't look at life on a computer monitor, we lived it.

I try to get my kids to put a little variety in their liesure time activities but even though I play a few video games with them they don't want anything to do with models. When I talk about the way it was or about a model I'm building, they say something like "That's cool, can we go to Game Crazy now?"

I believe we should encourage the young whippers who show interest in model building. I think people like jtilley, Big Jake, and others who do this are super. It's up to us old timers to make sure there is enough interest, and enough consumers, to keep this hobby and hand-made craftsmanship in general, from going away.

Duke Maddog's last post is the most encouraging news I've read on the model building front in a long time. Three cheers for those grade school kids - and four for Duke, for getting them interested at the best possible age!

I just got back from a meeting of our ship modeling club, the Carolina Maritime Modeling Society. It's a wonderful, congenial, informative organization; each meeting is a highlight of my month. The one thing that depresses me a little about the organization is that I, at age 54, am one of its three or four youngest members.

In a lot of ways we're living in a golden age of model building. I can remember the days, not really so long ago, when the concept of 1/700 radar screens and handrails was regarded as pure fiction. Back in the Good Olde Days of the fifties and sixties, contrary to what our nostalgic memories may tell us, new ship model kits were not really very numerous - or very good. Thomas Graham's fine book, Remembering Revell Model Kits, contains a fascinating list of all the kits that company produced through 1979. Not counting sailing ships and the numerous re-issues, Revell released nineteen genuinely new naval and civilian ship kits during the entire decade of the sixties. More new plastic and resin ship kits than that show up on the Steel Navy website in a period of two or three months. We have paints matched to prototype colors, a wide variety of tools made specifically for model building, all sorts of excellent materials to work with, and an outstanding range of reference books and periodicals. We even have our own websites. What we don't have, I'm afraid, is a younger generation coming along to pick up our interests where we leave them.

Part of the problem is that during the past few decades the pricing structure in the model business has undergone a gradual but fundamental change. We Olde Tymers can remember when a 1/72 airplane cost 50 cents; it's now rare to find a decent one for much less than $10.00. Inflation is responsible for much of that change, of course, but not all of it. When I was working my way through grad school in a hobby shop (1975-1980), a typical middle-class kid's pocket money could buy a small kit and the stuff to build it. Nowadays it can't. The market for plastic kits nowadays is largely an adult market. In terms of merchandise quality that's great; the manufacturers know they have to produce reasonably well-detailed, reasonably accurate kits in order to sell them, and they don't need to sell as many units to make an acceptable profit. But the price we pay for that quality, I'm afraid, is the gradual disappearance of model building as a hobby for kids.

Maybe I'm wrong; I hope so. Duke Maddog's experience doesn't exactly make me optimistic, but it does make me hopeful.

What jtilley saying about the model industries gearing more towards adults than kids is very correct.But growing up in the fifty'sand sixty's we had less active's than the youth of today.Most of us only had three channels on TV to watch and the only kids programs on where Saturday morning so we had more time to get into model buildingToday theres 75 channels or more on TV .Tons of stuff on the computers to get into where they can activate history in front of them. Were as we had plastic models to activate our history fantasies.They have computer games to use thier hands and minds.we had and still have modeling.A changing of the times and technology.

The pricing has rising but everthing has gone up.My first muscle car in 1966 was $2800.00 brand new.where my first plastic kit was .50 I know pay $50.00 up for a good model.
There lies the differents.My first plastic model was a Starfighter I thing had maybe 15 parts.The total detail was a pilots head molded on the fuselage halfs and I don't believe it had any landing gear.Back then I got .50 a week allowance. So to buy a model it took two weeks allowance to get the model and glue.This week I bought a Heller La Reale De France for under $40.00 I get over 600 parts plus the rigging.and my allowance now is lot more than back then.The difference is the quality of the model I'm getting now is far better than in the Fifties .And the value of the two kits are close to the same taking into consideration the cost of everything thats gone up.

Will modeling decline perhaps but I think there will be enough of us to keep it going.Remember back in seventies and eighties when we were busy with our youthful activitys modeling was in a decline but came back.and looking at all the model available today I believe its doing well .Just that the modelers are a little older now.
Rod

I finished the Aurora Bonhomme Richard about a month ago. I have had a very strong interest in this ship and John Paul Jones since I was a kid (I'm 55 now). I had been looking for this specific kit for well over 20+ years and finally found one for $150.00, a bargain at the current prices for these kits.

The others who have responded to this subject have voiced their opinions on the quality of these kits. This is my opinion. First, the sails are, indeed, molded hard plastic and as such, are very heavy for the masts. That did not matter to me because I do my sailing ships without sails so that the rigging can be seen in all it's glory (it is the rigging that makes these ships so awesomely impressive). Second, kits from the sixties did have many problems with scale and detail accuracy. This is especially true with the Bonhomme Richard since so little has been documented in recorded history. My answer to this is simply "Who cares?". If you build one of these, you have built a part of modeling history and that makes it well worth adding them to your collection.

But that's my opinion.

Dale

I remember my Brother entering the Forrestall in the State Fair model contest. He got first place because of the quality of the build. That was 1966. I entered 10 years later with a Revell Enterprise CV6 and again, got a 2nd. Its seemed all judges looked at was craftmanship. All the kits were out of the box, and always looked impressive. They never docked you for having the wrong color, or the radar was the wrong type, or the props on the planes are too big, or not enough PE was used. Face it guys, modeling was just plain FUN. Few parts, few criteria to judge, and a lot less stress.

Modeling is just like everything else today, bigger, better, and a lot more work.

Thats is why I have a stash of old kits, not to collect, but to just pull out and build on the kitchen table in one evening while watching old "Honeymooners" re-runs. It gets really nastalgic when I hang them on the bedroom ceiling, they have no paint on them, glue stains everywhere, and one of the decals may be upside down. However, my wife doesn't see it that way, so tells me I need to grow up now, while she is taking down and handing back to me my lastest creation. So I go back into my basement workshop, with all the power tools, professional airbrushes, and exotic paint and glue neatly arraged around my three workbenches, and contemplate how I need to install a scale radar set into a Accurate Minitatures SBD that I have been working on for the past three months.
Scott

Yeah....they were thick, simple, and sometimes questionable in accuracy, but they were FUN TO BUILD. I built my first kit when I was six years old (an Aurora Zero). I'm 50 now and still putting plastic together. In the last couple of years I've aquired a few of the old Aurora ships, or re-moulds of them. Personaly I like to see what I can do with them after all these years. Some of the Aurora ships were fair representations of the subject (such as the Fletcher destroyer USS Bennion) and with a little work and some kitbashing give a pretty good result. If nothing else they introduced many of us graybeards to plastic modeling. In this day and age teaching a neophyte can be an expensive proposition, although well worth it. I'd love to see a kit on the shelves at $.98 again! Or at least at a price that would allow youngsters to get more easily involved in the hobby. While I love the Trumpeter carriers and am salivating at the hints of what is soon to come (1/350 North Carolina) buying a kit these days sometimes calls for careful planning and a reflection of just how important the hobby is in the greater scheme of our lives. Ah well, at least it has the grace of keeping me off the streets at night!

Last fall I picked up the Wanderer on e-bay for $70.50 and the Sea Witch for $52.00 (both including S&H).

Neither kit (for that matter I don't think any injection molded sailing ship kit I've seen) is up to modern standards (for some reason ($$$), sailing vessels seem to have disappered from kit manufacturer's radar screens when it comes to new molds)

The two Aurora kits I have are fairly decent for general shape but are devoid of detail and the masts and rigging are pretty much useless. But if you are handy with Evergreen and a scriber, I think they may have a lot of potential (I'll find out this spring). The masts and yards need to be replaced by wood components.

As mentioned in one of the prior posts, there was little info to go on relative to the Bonhomme Richard until Boudriot's book came out a few years ago. It's pretty much a flight o' fancy.

I bought the Black Falcon a couple of years ago.... it would make a nice aquarium decoration, but is complete BS from a historical point of view. (I have one for sail if anyone is interested)

In my opinion schoonerbum's observations are right on target. Some years ago I decided to build a model of H.M.S. Bounty, using the Revell kit as a basis. By the time I got through (about three years later) seven pieces of the kit had survived. In retrospect, I could have saved time by starting from scratch.

I won't do a project like that again. My suggestion is to think twice before committing to a major reworking of a plastic sailing ship kit. Those Aurora beasts are great for starting the nostalgia juices flowing, and probably will appreciate in monetary value over the years. But I question whether using one of them as the basis for a serious scale model is really worth the trouble.

this was a godsend i found a kit on there that i've been looking for a long time like for
18 years now i can get it and pass it on to my son, thank you guys!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
cudos tho9900 i'm in your debt