Pirate Ship Question

Well, there are several possible answers to that question.  This Forum generally is devoted to scale modeling - i.e., the building of replicas of actual objects.  In that context the answer to the question, unfortunately, is pretty simple:  no.  There is no plastic kit currently on the market that accurately represents a pirate ship - or a vessel that would likely be used by a pirate of the seventeenth or eighteenth century.  (A handful of out-of-production kits just might be converted for that purpose, but they're hard to find.)

But how old is your cousin?  If he's a youngster fresh from the Disney movie, and not especially interested in scale modeling, several current kits probably will satisfy him.  Revell has just issued a kit it calls a "Caribbean Pirate Ship," which in fact is a reissue of its 1960 "Peter Pan Jolly Roger" kit.  It's a more-or-less accurate reproduction of the "ship" at Disneyland, which in turn is based on the 1953 Disney animated version of "Peter Pan."  It bears no resemblance to any actual ship that ever floated, but for your present purposes you may not care about that.

Lindberg, hoping to cash in on the current popularity of things piratical, has reissued several old sailing ship kits in boxes that describe them as "pirate ships."  The Lindberg "Jolly Roger" was originally an eighteenth-century French frigate, La Flore.  The "Captain Kidd" was, of all things, the German two-decked warship Wappen von Hamburg.  The one Lindberg calls "Blackbeard Pirate Ship" was originally the seventeenth-century English warship Sovereign of the Seas, and "Sir Henry Morgan" was the French seventeenth-century warship St. Louis.  Historically, the thought of any such ship being operated by a pirate crew is utterly absurd.  But, again, in your current situation that may or may not be of importance.  Quite a few members of this forum have built, or are building, the Lindberg "Jolly Roger" in one guise or another; it is, for its age (it was originally issued in the mid-sixties) a pretty nice kit, though pretty complicated for newcomers.

Have fun.  Good luck.

If we knew his age, it would help.  A "pirate" ship is a broad term, since pirates, or buccaneers, or privateers, depending on who was working for whom, sailed on a wide range of ship types from dugout canoes to 50 gun man o wars.  The most common were small coastal ships that had shallow draft and two masts.  Even today, any fishing boat can be built to represent a modern pirate ship.  We can build a pirate ship from any time period.  The reason why I am leading into the time period and type of ship is that one of the best "beginner" sailing ship kits I would recommend would be Revell's Santa Maria.  Although an old kit, it still has good moldings, is a good size to add details, great fit, limited masts, spars, and rigging, and can be decorated to look as intimidating as the Dark Pearl.  Anyone with experience with armor, planes, or cars could build this kit in a few evenings and have a lot of fun while learning some basic construction skills that will be required to build a plastic sailing ship.

Scott

Interesting idea.  Another possibility would be the Revell Golden Hind.  Sir Francis Drake was, after all, by some perfectly reasonable definitions a pirate.

The big problem:  neither that kit nor the Santa Maria is currently in either the Revell-Monogram U.S. or the Revell Germany catalog.  The Santa Maria probably would be a little easier to find; it was re-issued back in 1992 in conjunction with the 500th anniversary of Columbus's first voyage.  The Golden Hind - one of the best plastic sailing ship kits ever, in my personal opinion - is scarce. 

The unfortunate truth is that the choices available to the plastic sailing ship enthusiast these days is severely limited.  The current Revell-Monogram catalog contains two sailing ships:  the 1/192 Constitution  (originally released in 1956) and the 1/96 Constitution (1965).  The only other American company currently selling sailing ship kits is Lindberg, which offers about a dozen kits, all of them reissues dating from the fifties and sixties.  Revell Germany, whose kits are available in the US through hobby shops and mail order, has a few more old Revell sailing ships in its catalog, but just a shadow of what the line used to be.  Airfix (Britain) and Heller (France) have a few more.  Maybe, in fact, Heller is the best source for "pirate ships."  The company has a long-standing habit of recycling hulls with different decorations and spars to represent different ships, many of them utterly fictitious; I've long since lost track of how many allegedly different kits Heller has sold, but some of them might look sort of like the ones in the movie.  And Heller does have a Santa Maria.

This is a bad time for plastic sailing ship enthusiasts.

I also have the Heller Santa Maria, which is also marketed under the Humbrol/Heller name.   This kit has a different hull and is a little larger then the Revell kit and it too is not too hard to build.  Except for two things; the instructions look to have been written in French, translated into Japanese, and then translated to English so you can get an idea on the problems that will create for the new modeler.  Also, the masts are typical Heller and are as soft as a cattail stem.  They bend and twist with the slightest resistance when rigging and need re-enforcement or to be replaced.  The Revell kit, on the other hand, has not warp, fit, or bend problems and no need for modification.

I didn't look at the current Revell lin up for this year.  But my LHS and Hobby Lobby still has a number of kits of the 1/192 Constitution, Bounty, Pinta, and Santa Maria.  Judging by this inventory, these must not have been big sellers thus why Revell has discontinued them.

Scott

How big of a model does he want? Aquacraft is releasing a RTR radio control pirate ship, the Kings Ransom.  The model should be in hobby shops in early August. 

As long as it has sails and cannons it will do.Historical accuracy is of absolutely no import.This build will simply be about fun.Thanks for the responses so far.

Hello, another of my mothballed thread activation attempts here

As always professor put it right, there's unfortunately not an existing plastic kit of a pirate ship or something suitable for an exact conversion. If someone would like to try his chances however, I think there are a few models which offer a fair degree of success. Yet before starting, I'd like to state that I limit my definition of piracy into those west eurpean maritime robbers who operated in the trade routes of new world and, to a lesser degree, in africa c.1620-c.1730.

For the ships of that first surge of american naval robbers, so called buccaneers, I could find one suitable type rendered in miniature: a dutch jacht. There are two kits of those particular ships as far as I know: a resin one from Artitec in 1/87 (a suberp model) and another very old Pyro kit in plastic. I'm neither aware of its scale nor its quality (which I don't expect to be very high). One masted, fore and aft rigged and of shallow draught, that jacht looks like to be the best candidate for conversion. Sometimes, especially during the wars when their "skills" were needed by their countries of birth, Buccaneers were leased small regular warships. As such, Lindberg's Wappen for Hamburg (a.k.a Captain Kidd) may be a good choice for a simple conversion.

For the "Golden Age of Pirates" (I must confess I have quite a difficulty in uderstanding this term), We are really unlucky. The early sloops and schooners which were most often used by pirates are not rendered in plastic. The only pirate who used a regular warship was Bartholomew Roberts, whose vessel was an ex-french fourth rate. Such a fourth rate of french lines exists in 1/96 scale, the Russian warship Goto Predestinatsiya from Alanger. Big armed merchants were also sometimes pressed to service, like Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge, but I'm not aware of any such kit too.

Ironically, there exists two injection kits which are exactly pirate craft, but not what you would exactly expect: the Xebec from Imai (1/80) and the Tartane (a.k.a le Corsaire) from Heller (1/125), vessels of Barbary corsairs I'm not sure however how much they meet your expectation from the term "pirate".

I had begun a thread asking which model would best be used as a conversion possibity for a model of the POTC Black Pearl. Several told me that the Linburgh Captain Kidd kit would be the closest to the Black Pearl, an Indiaman in other words. I have yet to figure out how to begin this modification but I did get two kits just in case I headed off into the wrong direction on my first attempt.

 

Peewee

Depending on your modeling experience the Le Couronne by COREL @ 1:100 (kit number SM17) is the best base to start with;  it is however a double plank-on-bulkhead wooden model kit and is rated "Advanced" and sells for $449.99 through Model Expo.  Along with the "Advanced" status it will require some major stern and bow modifications as well as sewing of sails from dyed muslin cloth and some resin casting for the headpiece, though time consuming, is not very difficult for the experienced wooden ship modeler.  The final modified model is 35"L x 16W x  32"H.  If you chose to build it yourself then I would also suggest that you visit www.micromark.com for the hard-to-find tools you'll need.  This all sounds expensive but wooden ship modeling is a great hobby and you'll learn much about very detailed work and ships.  

Or you can just purchase a finished "Black Pearl" @ www.modelshipmaster.com for $990.00 but you will not have experienced the joy and satisfaction of building your own work-of-art. 

The Revell Caribbean Pirate Ship mentioned earlier is available at a pretty low cost.  The picture I saw in Squadron did not show sails however.

Dave 

 

Good looking candidate is this Pirate schooner Adventure from Amati. This is, however, a wooden plank-on-bulkhead kit:

 

 

available at ModelExpo

or at Historicships.com

 

TD,

As you see there are a lot of options out there.

Since your cousin is a beginner, its probably best to get a plastic kit, one he or she can build easily and have the reward of a completed model. It should be low cost, and if messed up a bit on the first time, no worries.

It should also say "Pirate Ship" on the package - regardless of what is actually in the box. This adds to the fun. Pay no attention to the fact that the model is actually a French this or English that. They all have cannons and sails. Its all about the imagination.

The Lindberg kits are perfect - you can pick any of them up for little money, they all have pirates and skull anfd crossbones on the package and come with fun pirate flags for the model. It does not matter which one, they all build about the same. I strongly recommend them.

If your cousin wants to build in wood, which is more challenging, the Amati Pirate Schooner is a good one, since its based somewhat on a Barbados sloop, actually used by pirates from time to time, and is as simple as wood ship kits come. But its still challenging, will take longer to build and require more skills, like planking curved surfaces, etc.

I would not recommend the Artitec Dutch jacht, as its more advanced and requires extra skills. Its a gorgeous model, I'm building one myself, but in resin and etched brass more like a MIG forum thing than a entry level impulse pirate ship model.

Bottom line - go with a Lindberg pirate ship kit.

Hope this helps, Jim