USS Constitution Paint Questions

I remember reading in the forums some time back about the colors, maybe do a search. I built that "Old Ironsides" when I was a kid, the one with the vacuform sails and I still remember the rigging! Man that's alot of lines!

    I have the 1978 issued kit  h-391-3800 kit, no scale is stated but it's about 2 feet long, the problem I have is I can't find the hull as several years ago I was painting it and I put it in a box to continue with it later when I never got back to it, it's among my boxes of books and other items in my shed in the yard, this kit has cloth like sails which are useless as they arestained so I'll most likley go with tissue paper rolled up to the yards, this an impressive kit the shed is scheduled for a cleaning out this summer so I'll most likley be working on this one too. Karl

The 1/192 kit was the very first sailing ship kit Revell ever released, in 1956.  (My source on that point is the bible on the subject, Dr. Thomas Graham's Remembering Revell Model Kits.)  It represented the state of the art at that time - the only competition coming from solid-hull wood kits, made by companies like Marine Models, Boucher, A.J. Fisher, and Model Shipways.  Those tiny guns, each with its own carriage and mounted on a little shelf cast inside the hull, represented a big step forward from the "dummy" guns provided in the wood kits.

By modern standards the old kit actually holds up pretty well.   Some of the details are a little crude, but it has the right basic shapes and can be made into a nice model.  It attempts to represent the Constitution as she appeared in the 1830s, with a figurehead representing Andrew Jackson.  I think the Revell designers actually worked from a set of plans that were drawn during the 1920s, when the ship underwent a major restoration prior to being placed on public exhibition.  At that time she had a simple "billet head" for a figurehead; I guess the Revell folks thought the Jackson figurehead would be more interesting.  (There's quite a story behind it.)  The two-piece gunport lids, with semi-circular cutouts, are in fact correct for both the 1830s and the 1920s.  (During her glory days in the War of 1812 she apparently didn't have hinged gunport lids at all.)  The other big differences between her 1830s and War of 1812 configurations involve the bulwarks (which were raised sometime after the War of 1812) and transom (which, from what we can tell, was considerably more elaborately decorated and had more windows in it in 1812), and the structure of the bow.  (Sometime after the War of 1812 the elaborate assembly of railings was boarded up.  The Revell kit represents the more modern configuration.)

U.S. Navy vessels of the 1830s seem to have had pretty boring color schemes, mainly consisting of black and white paint:  black hull with a white stripe through the gunports, white bulwark interiors (though green is a possibility), white lower masts, bowsprit, doublings, tops, and topmast crosstrees, white trim on the bow, quarter galleries, and transom, black yards, and oiled wood upper masts.  If I remember correctly, that's about the scheme Revell describes.  The decks would have been bare (or conceivably oiled) wood, kept scrubbed pretty thoroughly.  To my eye, the appropriate color for such a deck is a very dull, greyish beige - about like the background color of this Forum screen, but probably a bit lighter.

The biggest weakness of the kit (apart from the hideous plastic "shroud and ratline assemblies," which I've ranted against so often that nobody wants me to get started again) concerns the big hatch in the middle of the spar deck - under the big ship's boat.  It's supposed to be just that:  a big hatch, with wood beams running across it.  Revell (presumably as a means of saving additional parts) molded the hatch solid.  It wouldn't be difficult to cut out the hatch between the beams, but doing so would mean you'd have to build a section of the maindeck where it would be visible through the spar deck.  That's not the sort of project I'd recommend to a newcomer.  An alternative would be to paint the "hatch" black and hope nobody looks too closesly at it.  The boat stowed on the beams camouflages the "hatch" to some extent.

The kit is accurate and detailed enough to form the basis for a serious scale model.  Good luck.

Thanks all for the responses.

Now for some more questions:

1. If I wanted to scratchbuild the maindeck, where would I find pictures or line drawings (preferred) for this area?

2. The instructions called for "Brown" on the paint callout. I bought a spray can of "Walnut" paint at Wally world. It's a very dark brown, would this work or should I get some black for the hull?

3. If I used black for the hull, would I need Gloss, Semi-Gloss or Flat?

4.The box art shows scroll work painted yellow underneath the windows on the aft end of the ship. There is no scrollwork on the model and no decals for it. Are there any available after market? or is the scroll work gone in the 1830s (thanks for that info, it gives me a reference point to research)?

5. The instructions call for the entire mast to be painted white. Is this wrong?

6. Is there a good reference site for the Constitution? Everything I've found so far has been a little lacking in details.

Thanks all for putting up with a new ship modeler. I'm not new to modeling, just ships. 

Wow - that's quite a list!  It would be possible to do a lengthy post on each of those questions, but I'll try to keep this from being interminable.

First a caveat.  There's an enormous amount of information out there about sailing ship modeling, the Constitution, and sailing warships in general.  For newcomers it has the potential to be really intimidating and downright discouraging.  Nobody in this Forum - least of all me - wants to have that effect on anybody else.  I'm sure you'd make the same observation to any newcomer in the aircraft realm.  Don't feel like you're expected to read and absorb everything, or to achieve near-perfection the first time around.

Now, I'll see what I can do with those questions, one at a time.

1.  To build a serious scale model of a sailing vessel, you need a good set of plans.  Drawings of the Constitution have been published in lots of sources.  The most recent, and probably the most accessible, is the book Anatomy of the Ship:  The 44-Gun Frigate Consitution, Old Ironsides, by Karl Heinz Marquardt.  It includes more than 250 drawings - not only of the hull and decks but of virtually every individual component of the ship.  Marquardt uses the term "gun deck" for the deck in question; "main deck" and "gun deck" seem to have been used almost interchangeably on contemporary plans of frigates.  (The uppermost deck - the only one in the Revell kit - is the spar deck.)

That book has generated some rather emotional controversy.  If you're interested, check out this thread:  http://www.finescale.com/FSM/CS/forums/634200/ShowPost.aspx .  I'll stick with the view I expressed there:  the author of the book missed some sources that he really should have consulted, and there are some mistakes in it - which are clearly identified in that thread.  But it's basically sound, and the illustrations are excellent.  For the purpose of building a 1/192 plastic model it's more than satisfactory.

If you're interested in the history of the ship, the first book to get is A Most Fortunate Ship, by Capt. Tyrone G. Martin (USN, Ret.).  Captain Martin was the ship's commanding officer during her major restoration for the U.S. bicentennial, in the 1970s.  He knows more about her than anybody else; the book is fascinating.  If possible, get the revised second edition.

2.  I imagine the "brown" referred to in the instructions is mainly on details, such as fiferails and gun carriages.  I don't recommend a spray can for any work of that sort.  You're obviously acquainted with the range of paints for aircraft models; take a look at the range of browns available from Testor's and PollyScale.  Forget the labels; you don't care if it's Israeli Armor Red-Brown or British Dark Earth (or Boxcar Red or Union Pacific Yellow).  Look for a few shades of brown that look like wood.  Trust your eye.  For the exterior of the hull, you're representing the appearance of black paint.  Do it the way you'd do it on an airplane.

3.  The paint on the real ship during the 1830s probably was glossy or semi-glossy when fresh.  There's a general consensus among scale ship modelers, though, that - especially on small scales like this - glossy paint wrecks the scale effect.  Most experienced modelers use flat paints, or perhaps paint with just a tiny bit of sheen.  I think I'm fairly safe in asserting that, though there are plenty of exceptions, most sailing ship modelers don't use spray paints or airbrushes.  Brush painting is a near-essential skill for this kind of modeling - especially on small scales.

4.  I think the box art Revell is currently using for this kit was originally painted for the company's big 1/96 kit, which represents the ship's 1814 configuration.  The transom in your kit matches the one on the real ship as she was in 1956 - and probably is about right for the 1830s.  (Nobody's exactly sure what her transom looked like throughout her history.  Marquardt's book shows four versions of it - with three, four, six and eight windows.) 

Unfortunately, scarcely any aftermarket photo-etched parts for sailing ship models are available.  I am unaware of any aftermarket merchandise designed specifically for a plastic sailing ship kit. Plastic sailing ship modelers do make lots of use of aftermarket cast metal and wood parts from companies like Bluejacket (www.bluejacketinc.com) and Model Expo (www.modelexpoonline.com).  But you're not going to find anything like the sorts of "ship sets" that cater to the twentieth-century warship modelers.

5.  Yes - it's wrong.  Each mast is made up of three parts:  lower mast, topmast, and topgallant mast.  Each has four yards (the horizontal spars from which the sails are suspended):  lower, topsail, topgallant, and royal.  (The lower yard on the mizzen mast is actually called the crossjack, or crojack, yard.)  The lower yards are fixed in position vertically (though they swing horizontally to let the sails catch the wind).  The topsail, topgallant, and royal yards slide up and down when the sails are set and furled.  The sections of the masts on which the yard slides can't be painted; the mechanism that lets the yard slide (called a parrel, or parral) would scrape the paint off.  The unpainted sections are slushed down periodically with grease, making them a dull, orange-ish brown.  The lower masts probably were painted white in the 1830s (though there's some controversy over what colors they were during other periods).  The tops, crosstrees, and doublings (the portions where the sections of the mast overlap) were also white.  A glance at a good photo of the real ship will clarify all this.

6.  If you do a search on the word "Constitution" in this forum you'll find quite a bit of useful information.  The ship herself has a website:  www.ussconstitution.navy.mil .  The Constitution Museum, which is a few yards away from the ship in the Boston Navy Yard, has its own site:  www.ussconstitutionmuseum.org .  Another very useful site, which one probably wouldn't think of (unless one did a Google search) is www.polkcounty.org/timonier .  Polk County, North Carolina, is the current residence of the aforementioned Captain Martin.  He's posted some extremely interesting information about the ship on that site - including some material you won't find elsewhere.

Hope all that helps a little.  Good luck.

For reference, I would also recommend that you download the instruction manual for the Model Shipways kit.

http://www.modelexpo-online.com/instructions/MS2040_Constitution.pdf

It is specifically for their wooden kit, but there are a lot of photos showing details of the actual ship. And it shows details on some of the deck furniture and rigging.

Hello,

The following thread has two long posts regarding the USS Constitution's color scheme throughout her history: http://www.finescale.com/FSM/CS/forums/373434/ShowPost.aspx

Regarding the ship's gunports, the appearance of their coverings has been a matter of debate. According to one of those long posts, during the War of 1812, the ship had split gun port covers, top and bottom, but these were removable, and were not permanently hinged to the hull; i.e. the ports were either installed in the closed position or they were removed entirely. However, this model depicts the ship after the war, so split gunports hinged to the hull might be correct. Check out those posts to get more detail.

Jose Gonzales

The material Mr. Gonzales kindly linked us to is terrific - well worth printing out and saving.  I'm especially interested in the material written by Captain Martin and Mr. Gilkerson, both of whom I respect enormously.  (I share Mr. Gonzales's reservations about that other lengthy disquisition on the ship's color scheme.  I guess I have a knee-jerk distrust of anybody who says his "several" forthcoming books - none of which, to my knowledge, has in fact been published - are right and 160 others are wrong.)

I think the juxtaposition of the Andrew Jackson figurehead and the split, hinged gunport lids is ok, but I'd be lying if I said I was sure.  I just took a look at some old photos and drawings of the Consitution and, as usual, came away from them with more doubts than I had when I started. 

What concerns me a little at the moment is that Mr. Roadkill, who started out with the innocent intent of getting into sailing ship modeling by building an extremely famous ship from an extremely common kit, may at this point be suffering from information overload.  We certainly don't want to drown him in arcane minutiae about the Constitution and drive him out of the hobby.  Roadkill - please take a look at all this stuff and enjoy it; it's fascinating and informative.  But for heaven's sake don't let it intimidate you to the point that you're unwilling to put glue to plastic.   

An excellent point Mr Tilley.

I know exactly what you mean, you can be driven to the point of near inertia when presented with too many options and differing opinions.

 The wealth of information now available can seem daunting to newcomers to the art of modelling, but once an item of relevant information is gained it is hard to ignore in relation to ship modelling, and still maintain build satisfaction.

I suppose it all depends on what you want to get out of the hobby, but anyone who visits these sites must have some interest in enhancing the basic kit if only with 'authentic' colour schemes.

With these forums available, modelling has to be broken down into bite size pieces, reading, researching and progressing  - what I wouldn't have given for facilities like this in my youth!

It is sometimes perhaps hard to recall our early days when we were content to build ships straight out of the box using nothing but the box art and instructions, and being delighted with the result. However, the thirst for knowledge and ongoing experience lead us to raise our sights, and I guess that's what drives the hobby forward.

Thanks all for the answers to my questions (and thanks for the patience to answer them!!).

I'll be using the spray paint for the hull, deck and masts only. Especially the white parts! What I've done so far is get the hull together, puttied and sanded the seam where the two halves joined, sprayed the white for the stripe on the sides, masked the stripes (7 hours of tedious work there!), sprayed flat black* paint for the main hull colour. What I'm planning on doing now is dry brushing with the walnut* on top of the black. Now for a ouple more questions:

1. What colour are the beams in the hatch supposed to be? I've decided against scratching the deck underneath it and just using paint to make it look right. The pictures I've looked at don't really show the area all that well.

2. Can I get by with not using any sails? Furled or unfurled. I don't want to mess with the vacuu-formed jokes that were included with the kit. Also I don't really want to mess with making furled sails either. But, if it will detract from the appearance of the finished kit, I'll come up with something to make furled sails.

I read with great interest the topic on weathered copper sheathing. I have been searching for something suitable to do the lower hull with. What do I need to do here? Paint? Copper Foil?

Thanks all.

Mr. Tilley, don't worry about snowing me under with info. I save everything to disc or print it out to read at my leisure. I'm a strong advocate of the need to fully research something before diving into it. Thats one of the reasons it takes me as long as it does to finish a build.

Edit. *

This is what happens when you try typing while thinking. I wrote that I had sprayed the hull with walnut flavored paint when in actuallity it was black. What I was thinking about was how it would've looked if I had reversed the order of painting.

1.  The beams "showing through" the hatch probably should be a dark brown, like the coaming surrounding the hatch. 

2.  You most certainly can get by with not sails.  That's a perfectly legitimate way to display a ship model - some would say the best way.  Just be sure the yards are in the lowered positions. 

In the first issues of this kit, there were no sails, and the pins and holes for the yards guaranteed they'd be lowered.  If I remember right, subsequent issues added holes for the yards in the raised positions, but left the original, "lowered" ones.  I'm not sure how your kit is made in that respect.  At any rate, the lower yard on each mast doesn't move vertically, so it goes where the instructions show it.  The topsail yard should rest on the lower mast cap.  The topgallant yard should rest on the topmast cap, and the royal yard should rest just above the collar of the topgallant stay.  Even if Revell didn't put holes in the masts at those positions, it's not at all difficult to put the yards in the lowered positions.  And to the eye of an experienced ship modeler, having them in the raised positions is a dead giveaway that the builder didn't understand the fundamentals of rigging.

I'm not quite clear on how you've painted the hull.  I hope you didn't paint the entire exterior of it brown.  The Constitution has, and has had for about two hundred years, a black-painted hull, except for the white (or yellow) "gunport stripe" and some other white trim.  However you'd paint and weather (gently, please) a black-painted airplane fuselage is probably appropriate for a black-painted hull.  The insides of the gunport lids (which show because they're in the opened position) almost certainly would have been white in the 1830s.  Those white port lids, with their semi-circular cutouts, make a nice-looking pattern.

That thread dealing with copper sheathing offers some ideas on how to paint the underwater hull.  Revell did a remarkable job (especially in view of the kit's age) of representing the individual copper plates; you don't need to worry about that.  If I were you I'd paint it.  That other thread contains some ideas about the colors.  You can also, if you want to represent the ship as she looked when freshly coppered, use copper paint.  But, as we established, that copper color wouldn't last long.

Good luck.