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Revell AG "Passat" kit question

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  • Member since
    January 2006
Revell AG "Passat" kit question
Posted by EPinniger on Saturday, June 17, 2006 8:47 AM
This is another sailing ship kit I recently spotted on eBay which I haven't seen/heard of before (admittedly I'm a complete novice to this area of ship modelling). According to Wikipedia, the ship is a 3-masted barque which was one of the late 19th-century "Flying P-Liners" owned by the German shipping company F. Laeisz, and is now preserved as a museum ship in Lubeck.

However, does anyone know what the kit itself is like? The scale is given as 1/250; as it is a Revell kit I'm wondering whether it might just be a reissue of their similarly-scaled Cutty Sark or Flying Cloud, perhaps with a modified rig (as has been mentioned many times on this forum, Revell are notorious for doing this sort of thing). The eBay listing does not have a close-up of the kit parts, so it's hard to judge the accuracy of the kit.
  • Member since
    March 2006
Posted by jwintjes on Saturday, June 17, 2006 2:38 PM
While I have never seen the kit, I would dare the following answer: as the Passat is a four mast ship, as she's a museum ship and as the kit apparently originated with Revell Germany I doubt it's a remodelled Cutty Sark.

If I remember correctly, the Revell Cutty Sark is in fact in 1/350 and a reissue of the Imai/Minicraft one, itelf quite a respectable model.

Jorit

  • Member since
    January 2006
Posted by EPinniger on Saturday, June 17, 2006 3:24 PM
Sorry, the Passat has four masts, don't know why I misread the Wikipedia article!
You're right in that it's probably a unique tooling, not a modification of another kit - a kit of the Passat would certainly sell quite well in Germany if it's a museum ship there. It's just that the kit parts (from the fairly small, low-res photo in the auction) looked suspiciously like the Cutty Sark, and, from the box art, it appears to have 3 masts:
http://i20.ebayimg.com/02/i/07/6a/d3/e9_1_b.JPG

There are actually three (at least) Revell Cutty Sarks, the reissued Imai 1/350, the big 1/96 one and the one I was referring to, which AFAIK is about 1/220.


  • Member since
    March 2006
Posted by jwintjes on Saturday, June 17, 2006 3:33 PM
Ah, I didn't know about the 1/220 one, thanks for clearing that up.

As for the Passat, I just had a look at it - from what I can make out the hull could well fit to the Passat. What I find interesting is the stand; it looks conspicuously like a Heller one. Heller has a Passat in 1/150; perhaps that's a scaled-down version of it.

Jorit


  • Member since
    April 2005
Posted by ddp59 on Saturday, June 17, 2006 3:48 PM
definitely a 4 master ship, 3 tall masts & 1 half height mast- mizzen mast?
  • Member since
    March 2006
Posted by jwintjes on Saturday, June 17, 2006 3:55 PM
Actually quite a standard 4 mast barque. The box art is rather deceiving indeed.

Currently she looks like that:



Jorit

  • Member since
    November 2005
Posted by Anonymous on Saturday, June 17, 2006 4:43 PM

I have never seen a Passat model in this scale, there are 1/150 scale "Pamir-Passat" models by Heller.

Michel

 

  • Member since
    May 2003
  • From: Greenville, NC
Posted by jtilley on Monday, June 19, 2006 11:30 PM

I haven't seen the ad, but it seems most likely that the kit in question is a reboxing of a Heller 1/150 kit.  As we've established before in the Forum, Heller kits have turned up in a bewildering variety of boxes - and Heller boxes have held a bewildering variety of other companies' ship kits.  And we know from experience that some, at least, of the people responsible for the printed copy on Revell ship kit boxes have no comprehension of how scale works.  Labeling a 1/150-scale kit "1/250" would be utterly consistent with Revell's normal standard of behavior.

If it is indeed the old Heller 1/150 kit, it's a pretty good one.  I have two reservations about the Heller Pamir and Passat - one being endemic to the plastic molding process, the other a silly but relatively minor Hellerism.

First, that sort of ship just doesn't lend itself well to reproduction in a plastic kit of reasonable size.  Those German schoolships were enormous, and their decks were cluttered with complicated mechanical gadgets.  An early-twentieth-century "winjammer" would not be complete, for instance, without its Jarvis brace winches.  A reproduction of a Jarvis brace winch on any scale would be a major project; in 1/150 scale it's beyond the capacity of a commercial kit company and the injection-molding process.  The Jarvis brace winches in the Heller kits are recognizable; that's probably the best that could reasonably be expected.  One doesn't see many well-detailed models of this sort of vessel on any scale; that's one big reason why.

The other problem concerns the yards.  Heller molded each yard with a series of little oblong-shaped lumps on one side, to represent (vaguely) the jackstay eyebolts.  The modeler was supposed to glue pieces of wire (which, if I remember right, were actually included in the original issues of the kits) onto the lumps to represent the jackstays themselves.  Not such a terribly bad idea - but the designers, in one of those irritating Hellerisms, apparently didn't understand what the jackstays were for.  Those particular ships probably (I'd have to check photos to be sure) had two jackstays on each yard - one on top, for the sailors to hang onto, and one 45 degrees forward of the top, to which the head of the sail was secured.  Heller put the "eyebolts" on the fronts of the yards, where they look utterly ridiculous.  Shaving off the little lumps would take all of fifteen minutes - but the modeler would then be confronted with the job of figuring out some other way to represent the jackstays, in the right places.

Otherwise, as I remember the kits (it's been a long time since I've seen one), they were reasonably accurate and well-detailed.  They're challenging; a ship like that has an enormous amount of rigging, much of it extremely repetitive and, in the prototype, much of it made out of iron chain.  Those kits could be made into pretty impressive scale models.  I'm not sure I'd want to tackle them, though.

 

Youth, talent, hard work, and enthusiasm are no match for old age and treachery.

  • Member since
    January 2006
  • From: istanbul/Turkey
Posted by kapudan_emir_effendi on Tuesday, June 20, 2006 1:01 PM

You don't need to worry. Revel's Passat is not a hoax. It is truly a 1/250 scale original and very accurate kit. I have it. If I had a digital camera, I'd like to take photos of parts and send them to you.

Don't surrender the ship !
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