ship kit

I have the "Museum Classic" kit in my stash.  Nice looking box, rough base, pre-painted copper hull, fuzzy sails that attract lint, cathair, and dust and are molded to look like the ship is in a gail, but all around, a nice kit.

This was another one of my mothers "Salavation Army Thrift Store" finds.  Got it for $9 about four years ago and although the box was opened, the parts bags were still sealed.

One of the things about being a ship modeler, is that there are a lot of garage sale bargins out there since I think once someone gets the kit home and opens it up, they find that maybe they really don't want to tackle it and put it away somewhere until either they pass on and their estate sends it to the Goodwill or they just get tired of holding on to it and sell it for pennies at the Saturday morning garage sale.

This could be a two way street, for when I pass on, I have a feeling a lot of my bargins might end up this way if I never get a chance to build them.

Keep hunting.
Scott

Very interesting:  we were supposed to believe that sails were fuzzy.  Dr. Graham's book (and my memory) missed that one.

Well, the pedestals were nice.  To my eye, though, the best mounts Revell ever designed for a ship model were the sleek, black "cradle" -type ones in the Kearsarge kit.

Hello all,

There were "museum classic" issues of both the Cutty Sark and Constitution. The sails weren't cloth - the were "cloth-like". They took the plastic sails and spray coated them with some sort of fuzzy coating that was supposed to give them a cloth-like texture - but they only coated the front sides. I think somewhere in this forum or another, there's a posting of the Cutty Sark model with these sails. Here's one that just sold on ebay - note the circular cutouts in the box which allowed you to feel the texture of the sail material:

http://cgi.ebay.com/REVELL-1978-1-96TH-CUTTY-SARK-MODEL-H-393-36-LONG-MIB_W0QQitemZ270009474817QQihZ017QQcategoryZ4248QQcmdZViewItem

Jose Gonzales

I think the special edition Cutty Sark to which Grymm refers is the "Museum Classics" issue, which appeared in 1978.  (My source, as usual, is Thomas Graham's Remembering Revell Model Kits.)  Dr. Graham describes it as follows: 

H-393 Cutty Sark with sails (Museum Classics) 1978-1980) 1/96  $40-50 [That's Dr. Graham's estimate of the kit's value on the rare kit market, as of the book's publication date, 2004.]  Black, brown, white plastic.  String ratlines.  Cloth flag sheet.  Prepainted hull.  Philippine  mahogany base with brass-plated pedestals.  Reissue of H-364 (1959).

I remember taking a good look at the kit in the hobby shop where I was working at the time.  I think Dr. Graham's listing is correct:  it was the flags, not the sails, that were cloth.  (The flags were printed on a small piece of rather coarsely-woven fabric, rather than the usual gummed paper.  Maybe Grymm has seen a Revell Cutty Sark that did include cloth sails; if so I'd be quite interested to hear about it.)  The pedestals were indeed a big improvement over the plastic "keel blocks" that were included in the standard issues of the kit.  (How important they are should, perhaps, be determined to some extent by the price the dealer wants for the kit.  Companies like Model Expo and Bluejacket offer nice, turned brass pedestals that might turn out save money.)  The wood baseboard, as I remember it, was pretty nice, with a routed edge, though it was rather small for the model.  (Ideally, a baseboard is big enough to stop any part of the model - yards, bowsprit, etc.- from overhanging.)

In any case, the Revell Cutty Sark is certainly one of the better plastic sailing ship kits ever.  It was originally issued in 1969, and in some respects doesn't represent the current state of the art.  On the other hand, in those days the folks at Revell were making a genuine effort to demonstrate the potential of plastic kits to produce serious scale models.  Relatively few 1959 purchasers probably noticed some of the kit's finer points:  the rendition of the "wood grain" on the decks, the rendition of the table and benches in the saloon (which could be glimpsed through the skylight in the poop deckhous), the beautifully-detailed decals, and those wonderful crew figures - to say nothing of the figurehead, which, to my taste at least, is a finer specimen of feminine anatomy than the one on the real ship.)  It has the potential to be turned into a superb model.

Ebay has the 1/96 Cutty Sark on a fairly regular basis.  You can also find the older 1/96 Constitution which is a much better kit than the current one in the catalogue due to the fact that the mold was much younger back then and you won't get as much flash and deformed parts.  If you're lucky, look for the even more rare special edition Cutty Sark that came with cloth sails instead of the plastic ones, and a very nice looking base and stand for the ship.

Jake is correct about the origins of the Revell Termopylae.  Here's a copy of what I wrote about it on another thread:

"...before you start looking for a Revell Thermopylae, be aware that it's another one of Revell's notorious marketing scams:  it's essentially the Cutty Sark kit in a different box.

"Revell changed the figurehead (the Greek soldier in the Thermopylae kit admittedly is a beauty), changed the color of the hull from black to green, and changed the shape of the poop deckhouse.  They also deleted the deckhouse between the main and mizzen masts, and replaced it with a"cover" for an enormous hatch, which is completely spurious.  (Apparently they needed something to fill the slots in the deck where the tabs on the Cutty Sark's deckhouse bulkheads went.)  They....altered the arrangement of the lower deadeyes slightly.  (The Cutty Sark's lower deadeyes are secured to the pinrails inside the bulwarks; those of the Thermopylae sat on top of the bulwarks, with iron chainplates outside the hull.  Revell made the change rather half-heartedly; the too-wide pinrails are even more conspicuous on the "Thermopylae.")  That's it.

"In reality the two ships looked similar from a distance of a mile or so, but were different in several significant and conspicuous ways.  The bow of the Thermopylae had a round forefoot, rather than the sharp angle of the Cutty Sark's.  The Cutty Sark's stern is unusually bulky for a composite tea clipper of the period; to some eyes it looks almost out of scale with the rest of the hull.  (That powerful, bouyant  stern was a key to her success in the Australian wool trade.)  The Thermopylae had a much more delicate stern, with a sharp slope in profile, much more typical of a British tea clipper.  There also were some big differences between the two ships' rigs.  The Thermopylae had a "patent reefing gear" on her main topsail - a mechanical gadget that rolled the sail up like a window blind.  There's no hint of that mechanism in the Revell kit; it uses the same spars as the Cutty Sark.

"Revell made some beautiful kits all right, but frequently fell prey to the quest for the almighty dollar.  The most gross of its distortions of history probably is its "H.M.S. Beagle," which is just a modified reissue of its H.M.S. Bounty.  (The real ships resembled each other only in that each had a hull, a deck, and three masts.)  The Revell Seeadler, which we discussed on another thread recently, is a modified reissue of the Coast Guard training ship Eagle.  And the Revell American clipper ship Staghound is a hideously distorted perversions of Revell's earlier, and mighty nice, Flying Cloud kit.

"As I've ranted before in this Forum, this sort of stunt is the equivalent of selling a slightly-modified B-17 kit in a box labeled "B-52."  About the best thing that can said in Revell's defense is that it isn't the only company that's perpetrated such scams over the years.  Heller may be the worst offender; some of the things those French designers did as a means of camouflaging recycled hulls are downright laughable.  And at least one of the HECEPOB (that's hideously expensive continental European plank-on-bulkhead) wood kit companies has emulated Revell in trying to convince innocent people that the Beagle looked like the Bounty.

"Let the buyer beware; these companies are far more interested in making money than in reproducing history.  Those who are interested in scale modeling are well advised to avoid the aforementioned kits.

"CORRECTION:  As soon as I hit the "post" button this afternoon I started having doubts about my memory.  This evening I looked up the Thermopylae in David MacGregor's The Tea Clippers, and confirmed that I made a couple of goofs in the above rant.  Revell was right on one point:  the deletion the main skysail yard.  She didn't set any skysails.  She did carry Colling and Pinkney's patent reefing gear, but on her main topgallant; she had double topsails on all three masts, like the Cutty Sark.  (Interestingly, her original sail plan called for patent reefing gear on a single mizzen topsail as well, but somebody added a mizzen lower topsail in red ink.)  She was also fitted with a mechanism called Cunningham's Patent Brace Winch at the foot of the main mast, to control the braces of the fore yard.  The running parts of the fore braces apparently were made out of iron chain, with the hauling ends running through sheaves in the bulwarks, across the deck, to the winch at the foot of the main mast.  The Revell kit, of course, contains no hint of any of this gear.

"Revell did, for some reason, remove the studding sail booms from the "Thermopylae" kit.  That's wrong, of course; she set studding sails on her fore and main masts, like practically all the other tea clippers.

"MacGregor's book also includes a lines plan, which shows a noticeably different hull form than that of the Cutty Sark.  In addition to the very different bow and stern profiles I mentioned earlier, the Thermopylae's cross-section was rounder, with considerably more deadrise than that of the Cutty Sark.

"The bottom line remains the same:  what's in that Revell box isn't a scale model of the Thermopylae.  It's a slightly modified Cutty Sark with a green hull.  Buy a Cutty Sark kit, spray the hull green, and you're almost as close to reality."

I built the Revell Thermopylae kit (which, incidentally, is on 1/96 scale; if it were on 1/70 it would be really huge) for the first time in about 1961 or 1962, when it was quite new and I was eleven or twelve years old.  (Dr. Thomas Graham's fine book, Remembering Revell Model Kits, says its original release date was 1960.  The Cutty Sark had first appeared in 1959.)  The first one I got had the preformed "shrouds and ratlines," made from plastic-coated thread; so far as I know, all the big three-foot Revell kits (Cutty Sark, Thermopylae, Kearsarge, Alabama, Constitution, and United States) had them originally and every time they've been reissued.  (The very first Revell sailing ship kit, the 1/192 Constitution, had "preformed ratlines" in its initial release.  The smaller kits, including that one, later got revised to include injection-molded "shrouds and ratlines" - which arguably looked even worse.  But I'm fairly certain that all the big kits kept the plastic-coated thread ones.)  I agree completely that the things are hideous and virtually unworkable.  Those early Revell designers had lots of good ideas; that wasn't one of them.  The good news, though, is that the problem has a simple solution:  throw the things in the trash, preferably before leaving the hobby shop, and pretend they were never there. 

My strong recommendation to anybody wanting to build a reasonably accurate model of a nineteenth-century clipper ship on a large scale is to stick with the Revell Cutty Sark.  Unfortunately it may be a little difficult to find.  It's not in the current catalog of either Revell/Monogram (USA) or Revell Germany.  I've seen it in several hobby shops fairly recently, though, and I'm sure it can be found on e-bay.

For my money, the best replica of the Cutty Sark in kit form, plastic, wood, or otherwise, is the one that was released by Imai, of Japan, back in the late seventies.  Imai, unfortunately, went out of business shortly thereafter.  That kit has recently resurfaced under the label of another Japanese company, Aoshima.  It's available through Squadron Mail Order (www.squadron.com)  - unfortunately at an extremely high price.  It's on 1/120 scale - not as big as the Revell one, but in many ways the Imai/Aoshima version is more accurate and better detailed.

Hope that helps a little.  Good luck.

Mr. B,

The ones I have are from the time period you are looking for, but all have the pre-formed lines. I don't know if you've come across this bit of information, but the Revell Therm. is the same as the Cutty Sark except for a few pieces being different, the hull design on the Cutty Sark is different than the true Therm. Prof. Tilley of this board can give you the exact details. Do a search under Cutty Sark.  I have pictures of my cutty sark with hand tied ratlines. I also do not like the preformed ratlines. Look in my webshots album below.

Jake

http://community.webshots.com/user/jbgroby