Another interesting old kit - Imai's 1/150 Le Napoleon

Hello EP.,

I have this kit as reissued by Aoshima. It's one of the best plastic wooden ship kits I ever saw. It has shockingly few parts but the result is magnificent. The wood grain and the copper sheating detail is breathtaking. Only lack of detail (if that can be named so) is that there are no two lower gun decks but chambers for "half-guns". Contrary to the usual Airfix practice of giving you stubs supposed to represent cannon muzzles, Imai gives you the fore half of a gun on carriage. that gives enough detail view when placed. Only major deficiency is the almost non-existent rigging. Such a few amount of rigging is no way suitable for a major battleship model in a relatively small scale (1/150, the hull with bowspirit is 75 centimeters long). The molded plastic ratlines are included to that remark. However, it is certainly not a difficult problem to fix. L'association des amis du musée de la marine of Paris sells warship monographies with full plans included and one of them is Le Napoléon. The plans are in 1/150 scale ! (I assume imai straightforwardly used that same monography when designing the kit) The full rigging plan of the ship can be found there. The rest is upon the builder.

Cheers

I have this kit and did actually convert it to RC. http://de.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/steelcad2002/album?.dir=7afare2&.src=ph&store=&prodid=&.done=http%3a//de.photos.yahoo.com/ph//my_photos