Questions about first time building 1/50 scale sailing ship

Welcome to the Forum!  You'll find that it's populated by some pretty odd people, but most of us are relatively harmless.

I imagine the kit you're getting is the Revell 1/96 one.  (A model of the Constitution on 1/50 scale would be about six feet long.)  It's a generally sound, accurate kit; it's based on the plans drawn for the Smithsonian by George M. Campbell, one of the best in the business.  It represents the ship as she appeared in 1814, and thus differs somewhat from her current configuration.  There's been a lot of debate about various details of the Constitution and how they've changed over the centuries.  The current consensus seems to be, for instance, that she didn't have hinged gunport lids during the War of 1812.  That, however, is about the biggest criticism of the Revell kit that I've encountered in terms of its accuracy.

It's quite an old kit; it was initially released in 1965.  As such, it doesn't quite represent the current state of the art in some respects.  (Modelers have been wrestling for more than forty years now with the problem of concealing the joints between the sections of the decks.)  It also suffers from the inevitable limitations of the plastic molding process, which are beyond Revell's control.  (Lots of modelers prefer to replace the lighter spars with wood or brass, which aren't as flexible as plastic.  And the eyebolts are best replaced with wire ones.)  All things considered, though, it's one of the better products of the industry.  It certainly can form the basis for a fine model.

You'll find quite a bit of information on that kit, and the approaches various modelers have taken to it, in this Forum.  Try doing a search on the word "Constitution."

Your observation on the lack of British frigate kits is, unfortunately, a commentary on the state of this phase of the hobby.  At the moment the plastic sailing ship kit isn't quite dead, but it's on life support.  The current Revell Monogram catalog contains two sailing ships - both representing the Constitution on different scales.  Revell released its first sailing ship kit in 1956, and its last (a Viking ship) in 1977; the company has been out of the sailing ship business for more than half of its corporate existence.  It's been at least twenty years since any of the American or European manufacturers released a new sailing ship kit, and the one Japanese company that took a major interest in that phase of the hobby, Imai, went out of business in the early eighties.  Recently a handful of new sailing vessel kits have come out of China and Russia; on that basis I have some hope that the hobby won't die entirely.  But plastic sailing ship modelers are in a tiny minority.

Anyway, good luck.  Though the manufacturers seem to have forgotten about it, it's a great hobby.

JTilley,

Thanks for the reply. As for 1/50 - Whoa! Yeah, that was my mistake as the kit is the 1/96 scale representation. It's nice to know that it's made from the ca. 1814 plans which is more what I wanted, what with reading all the Aubrey/Maturin books. I don't want to get too crazy with modifications since this is the first model I've built in years, but is it very difficult to replace the eyebolts with wire and how about the spars? For the spars would you use regular wood dowels sanded to the proper shape or is there a mail order outfit that sells 1/96 spars and other ship detailing accessories? Anyway, thanks again for the info. Incidentally, I read a thread about converting one of the Airfix(?) Pirate ships into an HMS Surprise, but I noticed that Heller has some kits of what look to be French frigates and I was wondering if you know if anyone else has made a 'Surprise' using one of those as the basis. The two kits I'm thinking of specifically are the Le Glorieaux and the Le Superbe.

Matt Campbell

Making wire eyebolts is extremely easy; for heaven's sake don't spend good money on preformed ones.  Get hold of some brass or copper wire of the appropriate diameter.  (If it's brass, it will be easier to handle if you soften it by heating it over a candle flame first.  Copper is already soft enough.)  A set of drill bits, #60 to #80, makes an excellent set of mandrels.  Clamp the drill bit in a vise, loop a piece of wire around it, and twist the ends into a tight pigtail.  I find it convenient to make several eyebolts on  strip of wire at once, then dunk them in chemical blackener and spray them with flat-finish lacquer before snipping them off.  Stick them into the holes in the deck (or bulwarks, or whatever) with superglue.

Make your own decision about replacing the upper spars when you get the kit.  I've never found it necessary on large-scale models like this.  Other folks, however, report that Revell has been using a soft, flexible plastic in recent years that really benefits from replacement.

Dowels sold in hardware stores, hobby shops, and home centers (e.g., Lowe's) nowadays seem to be made of three species: birch, oak, and (occasionally) maple.  Woodworking supply companies (e.g., www.woodcraft.com and www.leevalley.com ) sell other species of hardwood dowel, including cherry and walnut.  Of those options, the least desireable is oak.  Its grain is coarse and out of scale.  Birch is nice stuff, provided the grain in the dowel you get is parallel to the length (which it probably will be, but take a careful look before you buy it).  Maple is nice and hard, but brittle.  Cherry is beautiful stuff, but expensive and a little on the dark side in terms of color.  American walnut (as opposed to European walnut, which seems to be quite a bit different) tends to be pretty coarse-grained for our purposes.

Two good suppliers of fittings and other supplies are Model Expo (www.modelexpoonline.com) and Bluejacket (www.bluejacketinc.com).  Bluejacket is a kit manufacturer that also sells general-purpose fittings and materials.  Model Expo is a distributor for lots of companies, including European ones.

H.M.S. Surprise was a real ship - though O'Brian frequently modified her somewhat in his imagination.  She had been captured from the French before the novel series started.  Several modelers have built replicas of her based on an old Lindberg kit, which, when it was initially released, represented the French frigate La Flore.  Lindberg, in an attempt to make some money off the current, Disney-inspired pirate craze, is currently selling it under the silly name "Jolly Roger Pirate Ship," but it's the same kit.  If you do some searches in this Forum you'll find several threads that deal with the various things modelers have done to convert it.

The Heller Glorieux and Superbe are ships of the line.  Heller does make a French frigate, La Belle Poule, but it's from a period later than the O'Brian books.

Hope that helps a little.  Good luck.

Thanks again for the really thorough reply. Clearly there is much more to building sailing ship models than I ever experienced when I built tanks and planes years ago. I suspected that  the eyebolts could be easily made using wire of some sort. Since we've already discussed some aspects of detailing the kit what do you think of using some type of real copper on the hull?

I noticed something like real copper on the Bluejacket website but I wonder if it would be overkill on a plastic model? Would I be better off just painting the details in? As I said before, I don't want to go too overboard with detailing this kit because it's the first kit I've built in probably almost 20 years and most of all I just want to have fun.

I did look at the earlier threads regarding the conversion of the Lindberg kit into an HMS Surprise. I didn't realize the two Heller kits were ships of the line - the photos of the box art aren't very revealing. If I have fun with this Constitution kit I just might pick up the Lindberg kit to try my hand at creating a 'Surprise.'

Anyway, thanks for taking time to answer my questions. It's nice to come onto a new forum find helpful people.

Welcome to the forum. I know your story - Master and Commander, then O'Brien's books, and then this strange and irresistible urge to build a model after 20 years of not touching sprue and glue. That's what happened to me a year ago. You're in for some fun, enjoy! All (well, 98.58%) I know about modeling, especially with regard to sailing ships, I learned in this very forum here.
I also have the 1/96 Constitution waiting to be built, but I won't be able to start before 2007. It's a beautiful kit. A nice review can be found at http://modelingmadness.com/reviews/misc/robertoconst.htm. From looking at the upper yards and masts supplied in the kit, I can't imagine how they can be used wthout being bent and twisted after rigging. They're just too soft and floppy. But I heard that different kits from different years vary, maybe your's is just fine.

Cheers,
SD

You'll find that the Revell moldmakers did a nice job on the copper sheathing - including even the nailheads.  It certainly would be possible to sand the surface of the hull smooth and cover it with real copper plates, but I wouldn't recommend it - especially if this is your first serious sailing ship model.  Covering the hull of a frigate like the Constitution requires well over a thousand plates (I don't know the exact number; it may be more like 2,000), and the rules for lining them up properly are complicated.  My suggestion is to stick with what's in the kit.

Bare Metal Foil used to sell sheets of extremely thin copper sheet with pressure-sensitive adhesive on the back, similar to the silver sheets they make for aircraft and car models.  It supposedly was thin and flexible enough to be applied right over the plating detail on a kit like the Consitution.  I never tried it, and the product doesn't appear in the company's ads any more.

We had an interesting discussion here in the Forum a few weeks back about the various possible colors for the "copper" bottoms of ships.  The bottom line is that the modeler has a wide variety of legitimate options there - ranging from bright copper through various shades of green and brown to near-black, depending on the age and condition of the copper you're trying to represent. 

 

Sirdrake,

I saw 'Master and Commander' and pretty much put it out of my mind. However, my Dad, who'd never read much other than sci-fi saw the movie too and was so entranced that he started reading the O'Brian books and turned me on to them. He bought me a hardback book I think called 'O'Brian's Navy' which I have laying around somewhere. He also bought another book called 'A Sea of Words' which I guess was good at helping to decipher all that jargon. Since then we've both been reading lots of historical fiction including the various Bernard Cornwell 'Sharpe's' books which also take place during the Napoleonic Wars - just by land. I've also seen all of the A&E 'Hornblower' movies and have them all on dvd. I think a neat project would be to try to build some ships along the lines of the ones Horatio sailed in. Maybe the 'Indefatigible' for starters! I know what you're saying about that irresistible urge to start modeling again. My 'Constitution' arrived today but UPS couldn't deliver it to my apartment so I'm heading off to the depot to pick it up tomorrow. I'll read that review you linked right after I'm done here. Out of curiosity, what have you built since getting bitten by the bug again, and what did you used to build?

It's good to hear that the detail on the hull is so good. I didn't want to get too crazy with super-detailing this kit. I figure with what I remember about weathering from my earlier modeling days I can probably do a decent job painting in the detail. I want to shoot for a somewhat weathered look rather than a flawless museum piece model. I had suspected that you could get some kind of pressure sensitive foil but then again, if the detail is already there and it's good it seems like painting would give the best result. Certainly less work, that's for sure.

MCampbell wrote:

Out of curiosity, what have you built since getting bitten by the bug again, and what did you used to build?

The first was the infamous Revell 'Beagle'. It just happened to be for sale at the local hobby shop, and being a biologist for a living, I thought it was the right ship to start with. I did have a lot of fun building it, although it was strange that the instructions called for so many changes - fill holes here, drill new holes there... Later I discovered this forum, and learned that the Beagle is just a slightly modified reissue of Revell's Bounty. Doesn't really have much to do with Darwin's Beagle... But who cares, I had fun, and that's what counts. The second and last one so far is the old Revell 'Golden Hind'. A much nicer kit (see my avatar picture). I can't wait starting the Constitution, and use what I learned during the last year.
I also built a Formula 1 car (Tamiyas F2000, beautiful kit, but I realized F1 cars *are* difficult. Everything is spposed to be perfect, and shiny, and spotless...), and some 1/72 WW1 biplanes - a fascinating subject. And those have rigging, just like ships . As far as I remember, as a kid I mostly did WW2 or modern fighter jets. But not to enthousiastically, never spent too much time with painting. Most planes would suffer horrific deaths in various dog-fights soon anyway

SD

Welcome to the forums!  I've got 2 of the 1:96 Constitutions waiting in the wings, one for each of my boys.  And talk about getting bitten by the bug.  It had been well over 20 years since I even touched a plastic model, let alone a ship model.  But, like many others, it was Master and Commander that got me thinking about it.  Then, I started playing a little game with my boys called "Pirates", with these little styrene ship models.  That was all it took.

Constitution is a great kit.  You can have a wonderful build right out of the box, or there are endless modification possibilities.  The bare metal foil you speak of is indeed available.  I had thought of covering the hull with it and did a test run with a small piece. It covers wonderfully, though you do have to be careful when applying it.  It shows detail quite nicely and there are several different tones available.  You can also get a chemical oxidizer that will cause the copper to turn color. I'm working on getting it to turn "in scale".

JTilley, where do you get your chemical blackener at?  Hobby Lobby doesn't carry it and I'm not sure where else to look...

 

Grymm

Bluejacket sells "Brass Black" (along with "Brass Brown" and "Pewter Black" - the latter being for Britannia metal.  I'm reliably informed (though I haven't tried it myself that gun bluing, which is available anywhere that sells rifles - down to and including Wal-Mart, has just about the same effect on brass.