3-Masted Bark info

The Japanese company Imai did a series of sail training ship kits in the late seventies, when "tall ship" fever was at its height. There were at least a dozen kits in the range. For their size they actually were pretty nice kits. Imai has long since gone out of business, but several of the kits have shown up under other labels. The originals were all waterline models; several of the new owners seem to have added underwater hull components.

I don't know much about the Mircea, but the basic resource on sail training ships in general is Harold Underhill's book Sail Training and Cadet Ships. I'm not sure whether it can still be bought new, but I found several used copies of it (for reasonable prices) on the "Used and Out-Of-Print" section of the Barnes and Noble website (<www.bn.com>). Underhill's book was published, I believe, in the early sixties, and is pretty comprehensive regarding the schoolships that were in service at that time. (It obviously doesn't cover the ones that have been built since then.)

Hope this helps. It's probably a nice kit.

Did a little more trolling in the senile old memory banks. The Mircea is, I believe, a near-sister of the U.S. Coast Guard's training ship, the Eagle. The Germans built four steel-hulled sail training barques in the 1930s, and all of them went to other nations as war reparations.

From the standpoint of the serious modeler, the problem here is that the four ships were quite similar but not identical. I believe all of them had different hull lengths. Underhill's book includes a good set of plans for the class leader, the Gorch Fock (sometimes called Gorch Fock I, to distinguish her from a quite similar, more modern vessel). Unfortunately that set of plans has been marketed over the years as representing the Eagle. I think (I'm not sure) that virtually all the commercial Eagle kits are based on it. That's unfortunate, because the Eagle (original name Horst Wessel) was considerably longer than the Gorch Fock.

I haven't seen the Imai/Aoshima kit, but I suspect Imai used the same hull for its models of all four of those ex-German school ships. Assuming (as I think is the case - though I'm not sure) that Imai used the Underhill plans, that hull most accurately represents the Gorch Fock I. I don't recall where the Mircea fits in this picture (i.e., whether she's shorter than, longer than, or the same length as the Gorch Fock I).

The Underhill book (which I don't have; I read a library copy years ago) sorts all this out. If I remember correctly, though, the biggest difference in length between the members of the class was somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty feet. On 1/350 scale that's about 3/4". Whether that's worth worrying about is a matter of personal opinion.

Interesting stuff. Hope this helps a little. Those vessels make beautiful models.

Jtilley thanks so much! I'll have to be on the lookout for that book. I can hardly rig a biplane, let alone a 3 masted ship! I picked it up for 250 yen and thought it would look neat next to my Academy 1/350 Tripitz & Tamiya Big-E!

Hi!
I'm from Romania, Mircea is our Naval Academy training ship, so I do know a lot about her, I even plan on building a model someday. The general view around here is that we're pretty much the only ones who've ever heard of this bark, so I'm a bit surprised to see a Japanese kit portraying our "national secret". So please forgive me if I'm not entirely convinced this particular kit is the Mircea.
Now, about the ship. Built in 1938 by Blohm und Voss in Hamburg for the Romanian Navy (sorry, this one did not go as "war reparations"), she is the only identical or "true" sister-ship of Gorch Fock I (the current Tovarisch). All the other ships of the class (Eagle, Sagres and so on) are longer. You can compare the various ships here (if you can read German, of course), though I'm not so sure about the accuracy of this table, the book I have on this ship gives a few different dimensions.
http://www.esys.org/gofo/gofofam.html
Over here we have the plans of the original 1938 version, but the ship has "survived" a few serious repairs, both in our shipyards and back at Blohm und Voss, so a number of changes may have been made.
A funny detail: our first training ship was a British built brig, also called Mircea. The current bark was built in order to replace the old brig, and to this day people insist on calling it a "brig", or "brig with a mizzen-mast"!!! They say it's a "tradition"...
Hope this helps, feel free to ask any questions.

What terrific luck! In F.L.D. we've stumbled onto a gold mine. That link he provided is the most straightforward and up-to-date explanation of this rather confusing subject that I've encountered. It confirms that my information about the difference between the Gorch Fock and the Eagle was basically right. What I don't understand is WHY the Germans built those ships in slightly different sizes.

It's been a long time since I've looked at any of those old Imai kits, but I suspect the Mircea one is virtually identical to that of the Gorch Fock - i.e., based on the Underhill plans. On the basis of what F.L.D. says, however, that probably means it IS a reasonably accurate reproduction of the Mircea (but NOT of the Eagle or the Sagres). Bear in mind, though, that all the sail training ships have undergone considerable modifications over the years. (The Eagle, for instance, has changed considerably in appearance since the Imai kit came out, in the late seventies. She now has a big, ugly wheelhouse on her quarterdeck and a double spanker rig on the mizzenmast, among other changes.) To establish just what any of them looked like at any given date is a bit of a challenge. The good news is that they've been popular subject for photographers. I suspect F.L.D. can steer you in the direction of some good sources. For that matter, you could use the kit to build a model of the Gorch Fock I - but the Mircea is a more unusual subject, and just as good looking.

One advantage of working on a small scale like this is that a simplified version of the rigging can be pretty effective. If the model is carefully painted, and the lines that are included are in the right places, the average (and better-than-average) eye will find it really attractive. Start with a good rigging plan (e.g., the one in Underhill's book), identify the really crucial lines, and forget the rest.

A few other tips. 1. The rope used in a real ship's rigging varies hugely in diamater. Using three or four diameters of thread (or wire, or stretched sprue, or whatever) on the model will make a huge difference. 2. If in doubt about the size of the rigging line, err on the small side. 3. If in doubt about the color of said line, err on the dark side.

Good luck. It's a great hobby.

I think the differences in size may be explained by the various navies having different uses for their "Gorch Fock". The prototype worked just fine in the Baltic or the North Sea, the Mircea is perfect for the Black Sea and the Mediterranean (and she has crossed the Atlantic a couple of times). A bark intended to sail on the Atlantic has to be a bit longer, I understand it helps to improve handling characteristics. And a longer hull means more space on board.

I'm really very sorry! The box top says "Rumania" right on the top! The instructions & history are, of course, in Japanese and I hadn't got around to having the fiance take a look at them yet!! The instructions do have a web addy on them so this kit can't be too old. FLD, if you are interested in the kit I'd be more than happy to send it your way! I paid 250 yen for it (about U.S. $2.50 ! ) & was just putting in the ship "To Build" pile. Like I said, thought it would look neat next to my 1/350 Tamiya U.S.S. Enterprise. The kit is complete & would probably "feel" more at home on your shelf than mine! I wouldn't know how much shipping to Romania would be, but I got a friend that is a bar owner over here and he would know Just email me if you want it! - Calvin

I still don't quite get it. The whole class of near-sisters was built by the German navy. (It's probably harsh to label them "Nazi training ships"; I imagine they were under construction, or at least in the design stage, before the Nazis came to power.) Maybe the Weimar government had different missions in mind for them. Or perhaps the change in length resulted from experience - maybe the first ones launched proved uncomfortably short, or something like that.

The histories of the Kriegsmarine that I've read virtually ignore this part of the fleet. I wonder if there's a German-language work that covers it more thoroughly. (If so, it won't help me much. My college-level German is so rusty as to be almost useless.) Or maybe the relevant documents didn't survive the war. I have the impression that a lot of the plans of these ships didn't. The U.S. Coast Guard Historian's Office has only a couple of sheets of original plans for the Eagle (ex-Horst Wessel).

Intriguing stuff.

well during that period the end probally was in site for the windjammers and from what i read they were cutting down the larger ships to make handling easier for small crews and such. Maybe they felt that smaller vessels would be profitable no matter what for the local (read europe) trades only? Then of course the the bad guys came on scene and mess it all up. As for training, I would think that everyone who was a sailor figured out the sail for long term was a dead horse.

Jake

The basic premise of sail training - in the 1930s and today - is that working on board a sailing vessel is excellent training for future naval and merchant marine officers. Lots of modern navies include sail training as part of the curriculum in officer training. The U.S. Navy hasn't done so since the late nineteenth century. The Coast Guard, of course, still believes in sail training. Every cadet at the Coast Guard Academy in New London has to make at least two (or is it three?) cruises on board the Eagle.

The theory is that a healthy young man (or, these days, woman) can learn the essence of seamanship faster from working on board a sailing ship than anywhere else. A sailing ship teaches navigation, teamwork, self-reliance, and marlinspike seamanship, among other things. And sailing such a vessel across an ocean must be a wonderful experience. Some people (including me) think the best way to learn to drive is to start with a standard-shift car. (My stepdaughter, who's had her license for several years, has no idea what the transmission of a car does.) Sail training is based on a similar premise.

In the case of those German sail training barks, I wonder if international law had something to do with the story. I emphasize again that I haven't done much reading about this, but I imagine the ships in question were designed and authorized by the government of the Weimar Republic while Germany was still making an effort to comply with the Treaty of Versailles. That agreement, of course, placed severe limitations on the naval vessels Germany was permitted to build. This is a bit of speculation on my part, but I imagine those sail training ships turned out to be, to some extent, the counterparts of the "glider clubs" where many future pilots of the Luftwaffe learned their basic flying skills. Whether the ships' designers intended them to serve that purpose is an interesting question.