I'm a newby can use some helpful advise

hi and welcome aboard. firstly you talk about paint. when you say testers, i think you are talking about the brand name testors.the two types of paint are acrylic and enamel. acylic is a water based paint and enamel is an oil based paint. acrylic paints have a shorter drying time and brushes can be cleaned up with water. they are best used airbrushed but that is a personal opinion.enamels take lomger to dry and are ideal for brush painting although they can be airbrused using an enemel thinning agent. if you chech with your local hobby store, they can give you good advice on paint and thinners both acrylic and enamel. secondly, if you choose to replace some detail parts, chech the section for wooden ships at a hobby store. they sell sets of deadeyes and other parts for wooden ship kits in various scales, you will find what you are looking for. thirdly, to make you own sails there are various methods. you could use old or cheap plain coloured hankies or i prefer to use tissues. with tissues, i layer a few and spray them with a water and white glue mixture. when wet, place them in what position you wish and let them dry. after they are dry, you can paint them to whatever shade you wish. i hope these little tips help you and good luck and fun building old ironsides. ,

Welcome to our world I may not be much help since I think I'm a little different in how I build, but I prefer artist acrylics (Graumbacher for brush painting and Deco Art brands for airbrushing) and oils (Rub n Buff) when building plastic sailing ships. A sailing ship needs to project depth and dimension, and acrylics are much easier to mix and work with when trying to get a scale look to a ship as small as this kit your wanting to build. In a few weeks, I'l be posting pics of my current 1/150 USS United States in the Destroyer Group Build. I like to use oils to do washes and weathering since again, I can adjust the tone of the colors much easier than with enamels. My advice is to continue to search this forum. We are always looking for that infinite question of what a particular ship looked like 200 years ago and how to paint it. Also, each painting method requires some research and practice.

I have built the 1/196 kit a few times, the sails that come with the kit, depending what issue, are not bad. However, there are many techniques to make you own for this kit. Three that I use are
1. Use cotton/acrylic coat liner and glue over the plastic sails using diluted fabric glue. This method gives a nice, canvas look, however, makes the sails a bit too thick for this small of scale.
2. The tin foil sails. I like using foil because it is easy to shape in the furled position. However, it needs a couple of coats of primer to allow the paint to adhere to the foil.
3. Parchment, tissue, and/or Silkspan. These materials give a cloth appearance when painted and are easy to shape by using diluted white glue, and can lead to the best results for small scale sailing ships. They do require some practice to use.

A few sources for fittings if you do not have a LHS are:
Model Expo
Dromodary
Model Shipways
The Laughing Whale
BlueJacket Shipmodels
Seaways Ships and Scale

However, in this scale, we generally must resort to scratchbuilding many of our fittings, replaceing the kit thread with higher quality cotton thread, and rigging the shrouds by hand in lue of using the plastic ones supplied in the kit.

If this is your first kit, I would suggest building it strait out of the box. This will allow you to complete it faster without running the risk of burning out, and you will become aquainted with many of the details of the ship so that it will be easier for you to tackle a kitbash in a later build.

I'll let some of the more experienced builders take it from here.

Scott

e065704 - Welcome to the Forum, and to ship modeling! You'll find this is a fun and informative place to visit. It's inhabited by some extremely strange people, but most of us are relatively harmless.

You've already been given some good, solid suggestions. I agree with them - including the one about building your first ship out-of-the-box. That old Revell Constitution kit is a classic; in fact it was one of the first plastic sailing ship kits ever. (It dates from 1956.) In picking a large ship on a small scale, you're starting with a big challenge. (Replacing all those tiny deadeyes would be an enormous and finicky project.) I echo scottrc's suggestion: use this one as a learning exercise - and, above all else, have fun with it.

If and when you do decide to replace the rigging fittings on a plastic sailing ship, there are several options. I'm a big fan of Bluejacket cast britannia metal blocks and deadeyes. ( www.bluejacketinc.com ) Some modelers prefer wood fittings; Model Expo ( www.modelexpo-online.com ) has a huge range from lots of different manufacturers.

Every modeler has his/her favorite brand of paint. Mine is PolyScale, a huge line of acrylics. Testor's acrylics are also good - and include some colors mixed specifically for ship models. Model Expo sells a line of paints under its Model Shipways label. I've had mixed luck with these. The range of colors is excellent - designed specifically for sailing ships. Some of the individual jars I've bought, though, have had a waxy, translucent consistency that I just can't live with. That problem may have been unique to those particular bottles - or to age.

Some months back we had a good discussion in the Forum about how to make furled sails. I've moved that thread to the first Forum page; it should appear just below this one, under the title "RE: real cloth sails." That thread contains some links to another website, www.Drydock Models.com. If you're interested in sailing ship models, you may want to check that one out.

Good luck. It's a great hobby.

Wow what a responce, I think I'm getting even more anxiouse to get started. I'm really excited to start my first ship. all the sugestions are great. anf the links are even more helpful. I really enjoy the small tedious challenges, it gives me a thrill and excitement. The fine details are inportant to me. I'm actually decided to build a revell cutty sark for my first build. One of the links I found on the forum is http://www.all-model.com/wolfram/content.html, what an amazing site. so for a new question what about knots?? Is their a link that goes step by step for tying knots? oh yea I was given my grandfathers bench, it has what I think to be everything for building wooden ships and cars. I even found a storage box with different deadeys and and assembled shrouds, woo hoo . Now I need a lesson on the air brush. Thanks again. I really like this forum, it is most informative.
John p.s. please forgive my terrible spelling

"It was in a glass tank with my aunt ..."

Not strictly modelling-related, but WHY did you keep your aunt in a glass tank?

That website you found seems to be based largely on an excellent book, Wolfram zu Mondfeld's Historic Ship Models. (I may have garbled the title a little.) It's fairly widely available; a new, reasonably-priced paperback edition of it appeared recently. There aren't many good books for beginning ship modelers, but this is one of the best. It would be worth the trouble and money to get hold of a copy.

One small caveat: Mondfeld's approach is very, very European. Some of the materials and tools he talks about are hard to find in the U.S., and some of the terminology he uses can be a little confusing. He's really enthusiastic about walnut as a ship modeling wood, for example - but the European walnut he's talking about is not the stuff American hardwood dealers sell.

I believe the Mondfeld book contains some good illustrations of knots. The truth of the matter, though, is that for your first model you probably only need one: the reef knot, otherwise known as the square knot. It's about the simplest knot there is; any Boy Scout knows how to tie it. The slip knot (which essentially is just a simple variation on the reef knot) comes in handy now and then, and if you ever decide to make ratlines to scale you'll need the clove hitch (which may be even simpler than the reef knot). If you're really interested in the subject, take a look at The Ashley Book of Knots, which explains how to tie hundreds of different ones. But for ship modeling that's overkill.

Good luck.

Here's a good site for knots:

http://www.realknots.com/knots/

There are also sites with animated how-to's. Do a google search if you are interested.

Thank you for the type of knot to use. I know a few like the reef and square knots, I just was not sure if there were specific ones to use.

Oh I messed up my wording. I'm not very good at putting words down. I meant to say that the tank was at my aunt house, she was not in it too :).

I'm going to start my building this weekend. I saw in another forum this link http://www.modelingmadness.com/reviews/misc/robertoconst.htm I think I'm going to keep a journal as well. wish me luck. Thanks for all the help, I'm sure I'll be needing more now that I'm starting. I'll alos post pics as soon as I get going far enough.
John