1:87 Airfix HMS Bounty

I feel like I ought to try to answer this one, but I'm having trouble figuring out just how.  Quite a few years ago I built a model of the Bounty, using the Revell kit as a basis. (The Airfix one hadn't been released at that time.)  I replaced all but seven pieces of it - and those seven got extensively modified.  The project took about three years of spare-time work.  Building a sailing ship model can turn into that kind of project - but it certainly doesn't have to.  And I don't recommend that approach for a first model.

It sounds like what you're aiming for is a reasonable representation of the ship, to be built over a period of several months.  With the help of the Airfix kit and a few good sources of information, you can do that all right - though I'd be inclined to recommend the Revell kit.  (More on that in a minute.)

Maybe it would be useful for me to make some very general observations and recommend some sources.  If that doesn't discourage you completely, I'll be glad to answer more specific questions - if I can.

The books and articles about this ship and her history would fill a good-sized library.  For model-building purposes, though, one source stands out.  It's a book called Anatomy of the Ship:  The Armed Transport Bounty, written and illustrated by John McKay.  It contains beautiful drawings of every conceivable detail of the ship - far more than what's needed to build a good model from a plastic kit.

I got involved in a lengthy discussion about the ship on another website, where several other people also jumped in.  That site was concentrating at the time on a "group build," based on a wood kit from continental Europe (which, frankly, I don't recommend).  Here's a link:  http://forum.drydockmodels.com/viewtopic.php?t=1339 .

There are two readily-available plastic Bounty kits:  Airfix and Revell.  Neither of them, unfortunately, represents the current state of the art.  Both have serious problems in terms of accuracy.  The Revell one has a mis-shapen bow, and really shows its age.  (It was one of the very first plastic sailing ship kits ever released.)  The Airfix one's maindeck is mounted on a slope that looks idiotic.  (The problem apparently got started when the designers put the hawseholes for the anchors in the wrong places.)  And some of the deck fixtures on the Airfix version are so badly distorted as to be downright silly.  (The pawlpost for the anchor windlass leans in the wrong direction, for instance.)  On the other hand, the Airfix one is a bit bigger, and features a passable representation of the copper sheathing on the bottom of the hull - which Revell completely missed.  On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the highest, I think I'd give the Airfix kit a 5 and the Revell one a 6.  But I probably am more picky about such things than most people.

Actually I think I'd call the Mel Gibson/Anthony Hopkins version "Bounty IV."  (Bounty I was bought by the Royal Navy in 1787, and currently rests on the bottom off Pitcairn Island.  Bounty II was a converted schooner, "built" for the Charles Laughton/Clark Gable movie of 1936.  Bounty III was built for the Trevor Howard/Marlon Brando version of - I think - 1959.  It's about 20 feet longer than Bounty I, supposedly due to the requirements of Cinemescope cameras.  And Bounty IV is the Anthony Hopkins/Mel Gibson version.) 

To my eye, Bounty IV is the best of the three replicas - with one large caveat.  As is discussed in the weblink above (and in Mr. McKay's book), there are two sets of contemporary plans of the Bounty.  The first was drawn shortly after she was purchased by the Royal Navy, and apparently shows her as she looked at that time.  (Let's call that set Plan I.)  The second (Plan II) was drawn several months later, after she'd been modified to carry breadfruit plants.  The modifications were fairly extensive.  They included the addition of carriage and swivel guns, a vertical capstan, airports in the after part of the hull, and a small deckhouse at the stern.  (Mr. McKay calls it a "flag locker."  I say it's a watercloset for the captain, whose private cabin facilities had been converted into a storage compartment for the breadfruit plants.)  Bounty IV is a fairly accurate rendition of Plan I.  She has guns, but no airports or watercloset.  (I got a laugh the first time I saw the movie.  In one scene Anthony Hopkins is sitting in his cabin in front of a huge copy of a sheer plan of the ship.  It's Plan I.)

It's always dangerous to be dogmatic about such things, but I think that blue color scheme on the Marlon Brando ship is completely bogus.  Blue paint existed in the eighteenth century, of course, and it's theoretically possible that this ship's hull was painted blue.  But in all the digging I did I failed to find any contemporary evidence that the Bounty - or any other British vessel of the late eighteenth century - had a blue hull.  A fair number of paintings and other representations of the ship have blue hulls, but I think all of them were done after 1959 - i.e., the people responsible for them were using the movie as their source.  (That sort of thing happens in "historical" research more often than we'd like to think.)  In my opinion that blue paint was a figment of some Hollywood art director's imagination.  According to the information I dug up (an when it comes to color schemes there isn't much of it), the people responsible for Bounty IV got it about right:  oiled wood sides, black and yellow-ochre trim, and probably (though I'm not sure whether the movie ship has this feature) dull red on the insides of the bulwarks, gun carriages, and deck furniture.

That's a start.  I could write about this ship at far greater length than any sane person wants to read.  If I can help with anything else I'll be glad to try.  Maybe some other Forum members can jump in with some more practical suggestions.

Thanks for that info.  I had heard that both kits were a few pegs short of spectaticular.  I chose the Airfix kit because it was bigger.

Not to split hairs, but the Original movie 'Bounty' was never renamed Bounty, it was always named 'Lily', but it was modified to look like the Bounty.  After the movie, the name Lily was reapplied.

I have decided to go with the Wood color scheem, although it appears to have some blue on the Bounty III.

http://membres.lycos.fr/hmsbounty/Repliques/bnty_sydney_THoward/sydney_terry_16.jpg

Touche!  Let's call the Mel Gibson ship Bounty III. 

When I was digging for info prior to starting my model (this was back in the late seventies - sheesh, I feel old) I looked at every set of plans for the ship I could find.  I noticed that a well-known ship model company had a set of Bounty plans in its catalog, so I ordered them.  They were marked "Reproduced by courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer, Copyright 1936."  Oh my achin' head.  I don't think the company is selling those plans any more.  Thank goodness.

Blue was a fairly common color for trim work in the late eighteenth century; I have no trouble believing that some of the Bounty's decorative trim could have been blue.  (I put a blue strake on the top edge of the wale on my model, as a matter of fact - though I'm not sure I'd do that again.)  In general Bounty III looks pretty believable to my eye.  I just wish they'd used the right plans - i.e., the second set of Admiralty drawings, rather than the first. 

That photo emphasizes a detail that usually gets missed.  (I'm not sure whether Mr. McKay caught it or not - and the lighting in the photo is such that I can't tell whether the builders of Bounty III did.)  Bligh, of course, published a best-selling book about the mutiny.  Most folks interested in the subject read it, and stop there.  But there's another Bligh document:  the actual logbook he maintained during the voyage (and somehow managed to preserve through the open-boat trip to Timor).  The log got published in a limited edition (back in the thirties, I believe).  I ran across a copy of it in the library at Mystic Seaport Maritime Museum.  It's a fascinating document, and contains a few tiny crumbs of information about the ship that I haven't seen elsewhere.  One of these was a log entry from the period when Bligh was making his unsuccessful attempt to round Cape Horn.  The log mentions that a big sea "struck the stern and stove all to pieces between the cabin windows where the sham window is."  I think the "sham window" was the one in the center of the transom.  Small ships often had phoney (i.e., non-see-through) windows there; real glass in that position would only give outsiders a view of the rudder post.  On my little model I made the windows on both side from clear plastic, and painted the middle one blue.

In another log entry, Bligh mentions that while the ship was at Tahiti a wood anchor stock rotted through.  He also mentioned that one of the other anchors had an iron stock, and commented that "ships that come here should have iron stocks."

Fascinating, if trivial, stuff.  Good luck.

Well, researching a model subject gives you insite into its history, and often other less obvious related topics of search.  The reason I know the first Bounty replica was named the Lily was because on a Bounty website, someone stumbled across original photographs from the builders, and after the movie, the ship had 'Lily' titled on her stern, someone proably remembered the bad luck of changing a ship's name.

Well today I went and got all the listed paint colors, which includes a blue.  I plan on starting to paint the deck tomorrow.  I have a few questions first.

1- is it better to assemble the deck, minus the masts, then paint it all the deck color, then detail the other little things you glued down, or paint the base and details seperate and then glue them together?

2- Any suggestions or good links about weathering wooden sailships, esp the deck and the copper hull plating?  I highly doubt the copper plating was nice and shiney.  I see alot of Bounty models with white where the copper should be, and some with just wood, and a few with actual copper.  Any idea what other ships of that era were like?

3- Sails - The plastic ones with the kit are well... bleah.  Any suggestions on replacements, or ways to create custom ones of cloth?

4- Deck color.  My kit manual doesnt show the deck color.  I would assume it is the same color as the wood on the ship's hull, but isnt ship decks a lighter color wood?

Well, I'll take a shot at the questions in order.  Bear in mind that the following are personal opinions.  I hope other Forum participants will jump in.

1.  The order of assembly is up to you - subject to the limitations of what parts have to be installed before others in order to make sure things fit.  My general approach is to assemble as much of the basic "carcass" of the ship as practicable before painting it.  Some fittings (e.g., hatch coamings) can best be installed before they're painted.  Others (e.g., gun carriages) really need to be painted first.  But the sequence is largely up to the modeler.

2.  There are lots of ways to make plastic look like wood.  To some extent the method to pick depends on how the manufacturer has handled the problem.  Some Revell and Heller kits feature "surface detail" that represents (sometimes quite well, sometimes not so convincingly) the grain of the wood.  If I remember properly, the Airfix Bounty doesn't have that kind of detail.  My approach probably would be to start out with a coat of a relatively light brown, then add some shading and a bit of "wood grain" effect by dry-brushing two or three shades of darker brown.  It would be worth the trouble to take a look at some photos other Forum members have posted.  There are some good examples of "wood grain" effect here.

The Bounty quite definitely had a copper-sheathed hull.  (The documentation establishes that beyond any doubt.)  Just what color it would have been is a matter of some debate.  Part of the theory behind copper sheathing was that the friction effect of salt water as the ship moved would constantly erode the surface of the copper, leaving the surface bright all the time.  I have my doubts about that.  When copper is exposed to air for a prolonged period it turns a remarkably light, bluish green.  Salt water seems to make it turn a duller, darker, mottled brownish green - though that probably varies with the precise composition of the metal.  (Incidentally, what we're talking about in the case of an eighteenth-century ship is indeed copper.  In the middle of the nineteenth century copper ["red metal"] started giving way to a brass alloy ["yellow metal"].) After the ship had been in the water for a while the copper undoubtedly would weather in various ways - and various substances, including seaweed and other marine life, probably would stick to it.  I'm not sure a genuinely accurate representation of an eighteenth-century ship's bottom would be something I'd want in my living room.

For what it's worth, on my model of the Bounty  (which is based on the Revell kit, which doesn't represent the copper sheathing) I used pieces of .001" copper sheet, applied with contact cement.  I weathered it with various shades of green, brown, and grey acrylic paint, dry-brushed in vertical strokes.  I'm pretty happy with the result.  But that's only one approach.

3.  I don't know of any serious ship modeler who has any use for the vac-formed "sails" that come with plastic kits.  My custom is to throw them in the trash before leaving the hobby shop. 

We've had a rather lengthy discussion in the Forum about this topic, in a thread titled "Real cloth sails?"  In that thread I made a case for furled sails as a nice way to display a ship model.  That's how I rigged my model of the Bounty.  I just moved that thread to p. 1; it should appear a few lines below this one.

4.  You're right.  The exterior hull planking probably was oak, and treated with some sort of oil-based varnish.  Some modelers have suggested, in fact, that the substance in question darkened with age, to the point of being almost black.  I have my doubts about that.  I think a warm, medium brown, about like the color of Bounty III's hull, is about right.  The wales - the thick belts of planking just above the waterline - probably would have been "blackened" with a mixture of tar and lampblack. 

The deck probably would have been a softer wood - pine or fir.  And part of the ship's daily routine was the "holystoning" of the deck.  A holystone was a chunk of pumice, which the sailor scraped over the wet deck planking to scour it clean.  Deck planking rarely, if ever, had any finish applied to it; the idea was to make it as un-slippery as possible.  For a good deck color I like a light grey with just a tint of beige.  (The color that forms the background of the page you're looking at right now is, to my eye, just about right - though maybe just a trifle dark.  At least that's how it looks on my monitor.) 

I'll take the liberty of offering one more suggestion.  The first step in building a good scale model of anything is to get a clear idea in one's head of what the real thing looked like.  In the case of a sailing ship, that means studying a good set of plans.  Photos of the various replica vessels are extremely valuable, but nothing can substitute for good plans.  They're particularly crucial when, as in the case of this Airfix kit, the manufacturer has screwed things up.  I don't think it would be too difficult, for instance, to fix that ridiculous slope of the deck, with the help of the drawings in Mr. McKay's book.  (The lowest point of the deck is supposed to be right around the middle of the ship's length; both the forward and after sections are supposed to sweep gently upward, almost, but not quite, following the sheer of the main rail.  Airfix's deck slopes down steadily from the stern to the bow.  That's utterly absurd.)  And the aforementioned error in the windlass post can be fixed in a few minutes IF you know what it's supposed to look like.  I'm not sure how hard the McKay book is to find, or how expensive it is, but if you get a copy of it you'll wonder how you ever thought you could get along without it.

One more.  If you don't make any other modifications to the kit, please cut the studdingsail booms off the topgallant yards.  Here the Airfix designers demonstrated that they just didn't understand what was going on.  The Bounty had studdingsails all right; they're mentioned several times in Bligh's log.  But she didn't have royal yards.  (Actually she eventually did get one; Bligh concluded that the lower studdingsails were "too long," so he "cut them and made a royal out of the canvas."  But that surely was just a small, temporary sail set on the fore- or mainmast.)  The purpose of a studdingsail boom is to spread the foot of the studdingsail above it.  In the absence of royal studdingsails (which were just about unheard of in the eighteenth century), a studdingsail boom on a topgallant yard makes no sense.

Hope this helps a little.  Good luck.

I am a happy man, because I still have pictures of John's Bounty model.

(John, if you want, I remove it from this thread)

Michel

Well, I started painting, and discovered that in a 9 gallon tank, 25psi will go a long way with an airbrush.

I looked at a few pics of the bounty, and other era models and tried to mix a good color... looks good to me.  I threw in the little boat for a color contrast.

Michel - This is deeply appreciated!  By all means leave it up; for that matter, if you'd like to post any of the others, that's more than fine with me.  If they're of use to anybody, so much the better.  

This shot shows, among other things, the approach I used to the copper sheathing.  It's real copper, weathered extensively with Poly-S paint.  The copper is fastened to the hull with contact cement.  The model was finished in 1980; neither the cement nor the paint (which was applied to the copper without any form of primer) shows any sign of coming loose. 

It's getting old now; I finished it in 1980.  If I were to do it again (gawd forbid) I'd do a few things differently.  The most conspicuous change would be to the red paint; I'd use a much duller shade.  (The shade I used on the model is quite similar to what's on most of the old British "Board Room" models, but I'm inclined to think it's too bright for reality.)  I probably would omit the blue strake at the top of the wale (I don't know of any reason to think it wasn't there - but I also don't have any reason to think it was).  And I'd use a different shade for the "skin" on the crew figures.  (Why I thought, back in 1980, that British seamen should look like they were suffering from some form of anemia, I have no idea.)  And a couple of years after I built this model I acquired a spool of fine nickel-chromium wire that works better for ratlines than the silk thread I used on this one.  To my eye the ratlines on this model are too heavy.

Oroko Sempai - Looks fine so far.  I'd forgotten that the Airfix kit uses countersunk lines to represent the edges of the deck planks.  That's an open invitation to use a wash on them.  My suggestion would be to make it a dark grey - not pure black.  (The caulking used for a real deck is no more black than the asphalt of a street.)  You might consider dry-brushing a lighter shade of beige as a form of highlighting on the deck planks.  That would make the deck color more likely to contrast with that of the hull planking.

That is a truly inspiring pic of your model.

I guess I better do some researching on weathering.  I know the concept, but never really praticed it.  Only thing I ever successfully weathered was a cliff for my model railroad, which I used indian ink dilluded with alcohol, then sprayed with a kitchen cleaner bottle.

Later I will do some research, it is Christmas, and my girlfriend is trying to get my attention!

Merry Christmas to you all!

Well, I am finally finding some time to work on the bounty model.  I decided I am going to paint the hatches(?)/access to the cargo hold like the following pic.

I dont know what those portals are called on tall ships, so it is hard to search for pics of them on other period ships.  Most Bounty models I see use all one color, but those models are almost always wood.  I have had trouble finding pics of the Bounty's deck online... so I guess I will have to wing it.  One thing I have learned about the Bounty, is that there are many diffrent takes on what she was colored like!  No 2 replicas are alike.

On a side note, I have noticed that alot of RN ships from the late 1700s have a blue paint scheem, like the one on the 60s Bounty II.

I like the model in that last photo.  The builder caught the major features of the "breadfruit carrier modification" - including the swivel guns, the water closet, and the capstan.  The tiller looks a little long to my eye, but there's room for different opinions on stuff like that.

"Hatch" is the correct term.  The hatches in the foreground are covered with wood gratings.  (If I remember correctly, at least one of them was a new addition, cut to provide ventilation for the breadfruit plants.  I may be mistaken about that, though.)  The general practice was to either stain the coaming (the raised framework surrounding the hatch) a dark brown and varnish it, or paint it red (like the inside of the bulwarks).  If I'd been building that model I would have made the gratings a little darker, but that's another of those places where personal taste can quite legitimately enter into the picture.

To my knowledge the only genuine contemporary pictorial representations of the Bounty are the two sets of Admiralty drawings.  Normally I'd be reluctant to make such a bold statement, but this ship is sort of a special case.  In her original guise as the merchantman Bethia she was an utterly ordinary, insignificant vessel - not the sort that anybody would bother to paint or draw.  (If somebody ever did discover a contemporary painting of the Bethia in her original merchantman guise the maritime history community rock on its heels.)  After the Royal Navy bought her she was only in England for a few months, getting those modifications made.  She then put to sea (on a mission that attracted scarcely any public interest at the time) - and never came back.  For any marine artist to have paid attention to her during that brief interlude in England would have been remarkable.

There is one well-known, oft-reproduced old print that shows Bligh being set adrift in the launch, while the mutineers throw breadfruit plants at him.  A minute's thought will establish that this picture can't be relied upon.  It obviously was made after the mutiny; the artist couldn't have looked at the real ship.

I find the blue paint on the exterior of the bulwarks on that model entirely believable.  Blue was a common trim color in the late eighteenth century; lots of bigger warships used either blue or black on their bulwarks (frequently as a background color for the "frieze and trophies" that were popular decorations).  Personally I've never run across a contemporary picture showing an eighteenth-century ship with an overall blue hull.  The fact that I've never seen one does not, however, mean by any means that none exists.  If it does, I'd be extremely interested to know about it.  Color pictures from that particular period aren't as numerous as one might think - and the ones that do exist tend to concentrate on big, glorious naval battles.  Beware, though, of later pictures - especially pictures of the Bounty painted after 1959.  I've seen blue-hulled Bounties on everything from book jackets to framed prints to movie posters to ship models, but never on anything that didn't postdate the Marlon Brando/Trevor Howard film.  Again, I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong. 

My senile brain just remembered one more tiny tidbit of information regarding the Bounty's color scheme.  In either his log or his published memoir (I don't remember which), Bligh commented that the ship's figurehead ("a pretty figure of a lady in riding habit") fascinated the people of Tahiti.  They, of course, had never seen a caucasian woman.  Bligh said he "ordered it painted in colours, and they sat staring at it for hours."  That seems to imply that the figurehead originally wasn't painted in colors - i.e., that it was either unpainted or white.  My intention in building my own little model was to depict the ship as she looked at the time of the mutiny, so I painted the figurehead "in colours."  But if a modeler painted it either white or natural wood, nobody would be in a position to argue.