19th century frigate

I sympathize completely. Heller sailing ships are notorious for beautifully-rendered decorative elements, inconsistent accuracy, and hopeless instructions.

There are plenty of good books that introduce the subject of rigging. The problem is that most of the ones in English concentrate on British and American practice. The French did most things about the same, but there are differences - and I'm no expert in them.

Two books that do cross the national boundaries are Historic Ship Models, by Wolfram zu Mondfeld, and Eighteenth-Century Rigs and Rigging, by Karl Heinz Marquardt. The Mondfeld book is fairly widely available in paperback, and reasonably priced. It covers an enormous amount of material - none of it, unfortunately, in much detail. The Marquardt book is quite detailed and beautifully illustrated, but also quite expensive.

The best expert on French sailing ships in print is a superb draftsman and researcher named Jean Boudriot. He published a large number of volumes dealing with specific vessels, including one on the frigate La Belle Poule of 1769. I'm not sure whether that's the same ship the Heller kit represents. If so, that book can be taken as the definitive resource on the subject and will tell you more about the ship than you ever wanted to know. Unfortunately Boudriot's books are hard to find and hideously expensive. If you live in the vicinity of a good research library, though, you might be able to find them there.

Some good sources on the British side are readily available. A good, cheap contemporary one is Darcy Lever's The Young Officer's Sheet Anchor. It dates from very late eighteenth century, but later editions got updated. Oddly enough the Lee Valley woodworking supply company (<www.leevalley.com>) publishes a nice, very reasonably priced edition of Lever, with updates that cover the first half of the nineteenth century.

An encyclopedic reference book on rigging (but again with a British slant) is James Lees's The Masting and Rigging of British Warships. That's a basic reference that's in the libraries of most serious sailing ship modelers.

The Musee de la Marine in Paris publishes a series of plans of famous French sailing ships. I think La Belle Poule may be among them; I'm not sure. If so, the plans can be obtained through Taubman Plan Service. That's a mind-boggling source for ship plans, operated by an octegenarian gentleman who's one of the hobby's great celebrities. He does have a website, but it isn't complete. To get his full line of plans you need to order his printed catalog (otherwise known as The Ship Modeler's Wishbook), which costs $10.00 (including postage). The address is Taubman Plans Service International, 11 College Drive, Jersey City, NJ 07305.

If you can handle only one book, the Mondfeld one probably is the one to start with.

Those are the ideas that come to mind immediately. Hope this helps a little. Good luck. It's a great hobby.

Thank you, jtilley, you are a walking library. I think I'd go for the Mondfeld first of all. However, Boudriot sounds most appropriate - the Heller kit represents the third of the Belle Poule series from 1828, which was later captured by the British, but I believe that the description of the 1769 version would still be a wealth of information.

Glad to help out. Good luck on finding the Boudriot book; everything he did is absolutely masterful.

If you have access to a library with a good assortment of Boudriot's books, take a look at the others. One or more of them may deal with vessels of a later period, and be useful for your 1828 ship. And regardless of the specific topic, any Boudriot book is a feast for the eye. He was one of the best draftsmen I've ever encountered.

I just took a look at Abe Taubman's website (www.taubmansonline.com). It's been much, much improved since the last time I visited it. I'm not sure whether it contains everything Abe has for sale, but it's far more comprehensive than it used to be.

And it does offer a set of plans for La Belle Poule. The date given is "c. 1834," so I gather that's the ship in which you're interested. The price is kind of steep: $50.75. But those Musee de la Marine plans are excellent.

Indeed it is there. However, since this is basically the first model that i am doing since when I was 13 or a bit older, I'd rather not invest in this particular ship :) This is more of a trial-and-error sort of project, since I am quite sure that I will screw up badly in so many places this first time.

Meanwhile, I have to my amazement discovered www.all-model.com which actually features some valuable parts of the Mondfeld book together with many drawings. The site also sells some quite nice plans and beautiful models.

Makes sense to me. Those plans are mighty expensive for a project like that - and 1/200 is a mighty small scale for a detailed job of rigging.

That website is a great find! The drawings (on the basis of what I can see on my monitor) generally look excellent - though the English terminology is a little fractured. (I gather the original language of the site is German. Words like "frigate" seem to have suffered a bit in the translation.) And the chapter from the Mondfeld book that's on the site looks like just what the doctor ordered. It even covers some specifically French rigging practices.

Anton,

You might consider building the kit "admiralty" style... just the hull and "stub" masts(or just lower masts with tops included with minimal standing rig of lower shrouds and stays) . Doing a full up rigging job on a plastic kit can be an excercise in frustration, especially at a small scale like 1/200. The plastic masts and yards tend to be too flexible and are best replaced with metal or wood. The lines, blocks and eyes for running rigging also tend to be far out of scale.

With attention to deck detail, a good paint job, and a wooden base, the admiralty models can be very attractive.

schoonerbumm: this might indeed be a good idea. The finer rigging will be driving me up the wall, thats for sure.

I got one more question (this would again seem to go in the direction of jtilley :)) - Heller seem to have paid no attention whatsoever to the way the shrouds are fastened to the boards of the ship. As I understood from the pictures I've seen, the larger ships in the 19th century all had the laternal "benches" on perpendicular to the boards (I believe these came to be called the "chainwales" after chains became widespread, I've no idea what those have been called before that), to which the shrouds were attached via double blocks. The chainwales in turned were supported by numerous ropes/chains pulling them downwards and towards the boards.

Now what Heller wants me to do on this particular ship is to basicaly leave around a number of eyes above the chainwales and then somehow attach the bottom ends of all shrouds to these eyes. No blocks are provided. This is where i start to wonder whether I got something fundametally wrong in the first place or is it the kit's fault?

I'm in danger of getting out of my depth here, because I'm not familiar with the subtleties of French rigging practice in the mid-nineteenth century. My guess, though, is that you're right. The lower ends of the shrouds should be set up with deadeyes - pairs of round fittings, each with three holes in it for the lanyards. The lower deadeye of each pair was normally secured to the outer edge of the chain wale, or channel, by means of an iron strop, which was secured to another iron fitting called a chain plate. The latter could consist of several long iron links (hence the term) or a simple iron bar, with a gadget on the upper end to secure it to the deadeye strop and an eye on the bottom to be bolted to the side of the hull. (All this is far more difficult to describe verbally than to illustrate visually. The Mondfeld book - or any other decent work on rigging - should make it clear instantly.)

This is the sort of thing that's difficult to represent in a small scale - and especially difficult to represent in molded plastic. The injection-molding process, by nature, can't produce a realistic deadeye in one piece. It has to have three holes in it and a groove around its circumference. Such a casting couldn't be removed from a rigid mold.

Ship model fittings manufacturers (such as Bluejacket and Model Expo) sell wood and britannia metal deadeyes, but on 1/200 scale they're mighty small and a challenge to rig. (A deadeye 1/8" in diameter would be enormous on 1/200 scale.) Bluejacket offers something called a "deadeye combo unit" - a britannia casting that represents a pair of deadeyes with the lanyards between them. They aren't perfect representations of the real thing, but might be a workable compromise.

People who build sailing ship models on small scales often make compromises in the rigging in order to give the visual impression that it's more complex and detailed than it is. If done intelligently and subtly, this can be quite effective. You could, for instance, omit the deadeyes, lanyards, and chain plates altogether. File a groove in the edge of the channel where each shroud goes, and lead the shroud over the channel and into a hole drilled into the side of the hull. Then put a couple of drops of Elmer's glue (perhaps with some black acrylic paint mixed in) on the shroud where the deadeyes would be. When the glue blob dries, give it a coat of black paint . If you're careful and make the blobs uniform in size, and line them up horizontally, the effect should be pretty nice.

Three golden rules in rigging small-scale models. 1. If you can't do it to scale (or nearly so), leave it off. 2. When in doubt about the diameter of a line, err on the small side. 3. When in doubt about the color of a line, err on the dark side.

Good luck.

Jtilley, thanks a lot. This advise is very much appreciated indeed - I didn't want to continue unless I have some clarity on this point!