Millard - I think you and landschrabbler may be talking about two different kits. Remember that Revell and Monogram combined have released at least five
Constitution kits. (My source for most of this is Thomas Graham's most interesting book,
Remembering Revell Model Kits.)
1. A tiny one that Gowland Creations turned over to Revell in 1954. It was sold in two versions, with and without a plastic bottle.
2. The old Revell one that so many of us used to cut our teeth in the fifties and sixties. It originally appeared in 1956, molded in two colors, black and tan. It depicted (more or less) the ship as she appeared in the 1830s, with the second of her two Andrew Jackson figureheads. Mr. Graham gives the scale as 1/192. The kit, according to Mr. Graham, was reissued in 1968, 1973, and 1977. The book only goes up to 1979; I think the kit's been issued at least twice since then. I'm pretty sure the smaller of the two kits in the current Revell-Monogram catalog is this one.
3. One of the best plastic sailing ship kits ever: the three-foot long Revell kit. It's usually described as being on 1/96 scale, but Mr. Graham lists it as 1/108. (I suspect he's right, but I haven't taken any measurements of the kit myself.) It's based on a larger model commissioned a few years earlier by the Smithsonian, and does a pretty good job of representing the ship as she appeared in about 1814. The kit originally appeared in 1965, and was reissued in 1967 (with the addition of those hideous vacuum-formed "sails"), 1968, 1977, and various times since. It also made a brief appearance, with a few extra parts, as the U.S.S.
United States in 1978. It's still on the market.
4. This one's a little confusing; I think Mr. Graham's book may contain a mistake about it. In the seventies, in an effort to stave off the financial disaster that was threatening the plastic kit industry, Revell issued a small series of sailing ships labeled "Quick-Build." They sold for about $6.00 or $7.00, and, with one exception (the yacht
America), were based on previously-released kits. They were somewhere between 18 inches and two feet long, and featured such things as one-piece decks and snap-on yards. Two of them were the
Cutty Sark and the
Constitution. Mr. Graham gives the "Quick-Build"
Constitution's scale as 1/159; my recollection is that it was a bigger than that. It was a scaled-down version of the big kit - i.e., it represented the ship's 1814 configuration. On the basis of landschrabbler's description, I think this may be the kit he has. (His has a gundeck in the waist, and only the midships gunports are open. The old 1956 kit had no gundeck; all the ports were open, but the guns sat on little shelves molded inside the hull halves. The kit number landschrabbler lists doesn't match Mr. Graham's book, but that only suggests that it's a reissue released after 1979.)
5. A kit that Monogram released sometime in the mid- to late seventies. (Here I'm relying on my highly defective memory of the days when I worked in a hobby shop and had to sell such things.) This one also was intended to appeal to beginners. It was considerably smaller than the Revell "Quick-Build" kit. It had a one-piece hull ("to avoid problems of cementing hull halves together," heaven help us), and I believe the yards were molded integrally with the masts. Mercifully it wasn't around for long. I've gotten some hints elsewhere in this forum that Imai may have sold the same kit for a while.
As a matter of fact there was yet another Revell
Constitution - an odd...thing...that the company called "U.S.S. Constitution Wall Plaque." It was another scaled-down rendition of the big kit (1814 configuration), with part of the hull removed and a "plaque" with an "authentic old map" on it to serve as a background. The modeler was supposed to paint the...thing...with an enclosed bottle of "gold antiquing fluid." My recollection of this desperate merchandising stunt is mercifully vague. According to Mr. Graham, it also victimized the
Cutty Sark and that awful other...thing...that Revell called a "Spanish galleon."
I think (I can't claim to be sure) the two
Constitutions in the current Revell-Monogram U.S.A. catalog (the only sailing ships in it - to accompany the huge total of five powered vessels) are Nos. 2 and 3. And it sounds to me as though landschrabbler has no. 4.
Just to make things a bit more confusing, the Revell Germany online catalog lists a 1/96
Constitution and a 1/150 U.S.S.
United States, the latter having a one-piece hull. Sounds like it may be a reboxing of the old Monogram
Constitution.
There will be a short quiz on all this tomorrow.
Landschrabbler - if you haven't either gone crosseyed or stopped reading by now, good luck. If I'm correct about the
Constitution kit you have, it may indeed be on about 1/110 scale. Or maybe a little smaller, in which case Millard's advice regarding N-scale people is excellent. (Better to err on the small side where figures are concerned.) If Mr. Graham's figure, 1/159, is right - that's even better. N scale is 1/160.
Welcome to the Forum. As you can see, it's inhabited by some extremely strange people whose minds run in extremely strange channels, and who really ought to have better things to do on Sunday afternoons. But most of us are relatively harmless.