Old Pyro Kits

I'm a fan of the old Pyro revenue cutters too.  I believe they're almost the only plastic kits that represent vessels of any of the Coast Guard's predecessor organizations.  (The only other one that comes to mind is the old Gowland line of plastic "ships in bottles," which was marketed by Revell for a while in the early fifties, included the revene cutter Joseph Lane.  It was about four inches long.  I think that kit may have appeared under one or two other labels at various times.) 

The Pyro Roger B. Taney /"Independence War Schooner" was pirated from the Model Shipways solid-hull wood kit, which in turn was based on the plans of the Morris-class cutters in Howard I. Chapelle's History of American Sailing Ships.  There was one basic problem with both the MS and Pyro kits.  After he published that book, Chapelle found another old set of plans that were specifically labeled Roger B. Taney.  (Chapelle's redrawing of that document appears in his History of the American Sailing Navy.)  It seems she looked a little different than the other members of the class.  (Her bow ornamentation was a little more elaborate, and there were a few other minor differences.)  The kit probably is a better representation of the Alexander Hamilton, or one of the other members of the Morris class.

Personally I'd be more comfortable memorializing Mr. Hamilton than Mr. Taney.  Taney got a revenue cutter named after him because of his service as Secretary of the Treasury.  Andrew Jackson hired him for that job because Taney, unlike two predecessors whom Jackson had fired, was willing to go along with the president's scheme to destroy the Bank of the United States by pulling all the federal funds out of it - thereby causing one of the worst economic panics the country had experienced up to that point.  Taney later got into the history books much more prominently when, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, he wrote the majority opinion in the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford, which largely wiped out the various compromises with which the Congress had been attempting to resolve the issue of slavery in the territories - and precipitated the Civil War.  Taney was a  brilliant man and, in many ways, a great jurist, but hardly the sort of guy I'd name a ship after. 

If I may be forgiven for waxing nostalgic for a minute, the old Pyro kit has some sentimental personal significance to me.  It was the subject of the first piece I ever had published - a short article in the August, 1974 issue of the old Scale Modeler.  I had sent in the article and pictures when I was in high school; Scale Modeler, as was its wont, sat on the thing for five years before somebody decided to run it.  I just dug out  a copy (most of which has turned yellow).  The finished model looks pretty awful (in my defense, I was seventeen when I built it), but I think the comments I made about the kit thirty-two years ago still apply:  "Considering its age, the kit, on the scale of 5/32"=1', is quite good, if one is willing to overlook such items as a small boat whose thwarts don't reach the gunwales, and scribed gunports inside and outside the hull that don't match up."  It certainly has the potential to be turned into a serious scale model - and makes a fine newcomer's project.

There's a fairly comprehensive list of the Pyro kits here:
http://www.quuxuum.org/rajens_list/rajen.html

It doesn't have much info on many of the kits, and has some errors (e.g the Alliance is described as the 18th century frigate of the same name) but is still a useful guide.

As jtilley says, many of the Pyro "$1 range" aren't really of much interest to anyone but collectors (there's not much point bothering with their Victory, Constitution, Santa Maria, Golden Hind etc. when larger, and much more detailed + accurate kits are available from other manufacturers - unless your display space is very limited or you need a ship model in a particular scale for dioramas, wargaming etc.), but a number of these kits cover interesting subjects not available elsewhere - the "Staten Jacht" (Dutch royal yacht?) is one example.

Their range of larger kits includes some very interesting subjects, though many of them are rather inaccurate and almost all of them are hard to find.

My favorite Pyro kits were the 1830-era US Revenue Cutter, a Baltimore clipper type of vessel that was most recently available from Lindberg as the "War of Independence Schooner"; and the Revenue Cutter Harriet Lane. (Sold as both the Harriet Lane and as a "Civil War Blockader".   The Harriet Lane is 1/96 scale, and certainly looks like a (pretty good) copy of the wooden Harriet Lane kit. 

I believe the Staten Jacht was one of the Pyro "$1.00 Series," which dates, I think, from the late sixties or early seventies.  A few of those kits have turned up fairly recently under the Lindberg label, but I don't recall having seen that one in particular.

The quality of the kits in that series varied from "not too bad" to "sub-mediocre."  They were quite small (less than a foot long), and varied in scale so they all fit in the same size box.  They had few parts (maybe 30-50 apiece), and featured horrible injection-molded plastic "sails" cast integrally with the yards.  The better ones probably could, if the spars were replaced and various other details improved upon, be turned into serious scale models.  I don't remember the Staten Jacht kit, so I can't comment on it specifically.

Pyro was a long-lived company that actually put out a large number of sailing ship kits during the course of its existence.  The first batch, dating from the early to mid-fifties, largely consisted of plastic copies of the solid-hull wood kits that Marine Models and Model Shipways were selling at the time.  (I knew the two founder/owners of Model Shipways; 35 years later they were still talking in sour tones about "Pirate Plastics.")  Those first Pyro kits, in the context of the time, actually weren't bad; they continue to be some of the best projects for beginners to break into sailing ship modeling. 

The company also made a batch of tiny sailing ship kits, less than 6 inches long, that orginally sold for 50 cents apiece.  The first few in that series had wood dowels for masts, and paper sails; later entries had injection-molded sails.  They were, in the words of my mother (who bought several of them for me when I was in grade school), "cute."  Examples included a Santa Maria, a Golden Hind, and a "brig of war" that, in fact, was a small-scale ripoff of the Model Shipways Fair American.  Most of those little kits were shaped like caricatures of the real things; the Golden Hind, for instance, had a hull shaped rather like a walnut.

Later came the "$1.00 Series," which was quite large.  Pyro also made a number of larger kits (18" long or thereabouts), including some European warships, the schoolship Joseph Conrad, and a really odd choice, the American training ship Alliance.  Those kits sold initially for $5.00 or $6.00, as I remember.  I didn't pay a great deal of attention to them, but my impression is that they were fairly crude, even by the standards of the time.

I believe EPinninger has a more thorough list of the old Pyro kits than my poor old memory can provide.  I have to say I regard them more as collectors' curiosities than scale models - though some, at least, of them are good enough to be the bases for serious scale models.