1972 Revell Charles W. Morgan

According to EPinnigers Database of sailing ship kits it’s 1/160.

 

Thank you.

Sorry, but I think this was a mistake in my database (it will be fixed in the next version)!
As far as I know, this kit is actually around 1/100 or 1/96 scale.

I haven't had my hands on that kit in many years (unfortunately; it's an excellent one).  The figure 1/160 is also the one in Dr. Graham's book, Remembering Revell Model Kits.  I think that may be on the small side, but there's no way it's as big as 1/100.  I think it's in the vicinity of 3/32" = 1', which is 1/128.

To get a real answer you need to get hold of a set of plans of the actual ship, and compare some measurements.  Plans of the Morgan appear in several places.  There's a fairly comprehensive set in the book Mystic Seaport Watercraft, and I believe John Leavitt's book, The Charles W. Morgan, contains at least a couple of basic ones.  Taubman Plan Service (www.taubmansonline.com) also sells a full set, if you're interested.

The kit is one of my favorites - one of the best plastic sailing ship kits ever.  My one substantive criticism of it concerns the way Revell handled the whaleboats.  The hulls are beautiful, but (if I remember correctly after all these years) only two of them have interiors.  The others are supposed to get vac-form "covers" - utterly un-prototypical for a whaleboat.  (There's no way a whaleboat, with its mast, etc. sticking out, could get a cover like that.  And the boats were kept ready to hoist out at all times when the ship was on the whaling grounds.)  Another point to watch:  in its initial release, at least, the instructions advised the modeler to paint the hull with the "fake gunport" scheme.  Generations of visitors to Mystic Seaport came to think of the Morgan as looking like that, and that's how she was painted when the kit was originally released.  Since then, the research staff at Mystic has established that she never had that color scheme when she was in active service.  (Lots of other whalers did; the Morgan apparently got "port-painted" when she was being used for the filming of a movie in the 1920s.)  She now has an overall black hull - maybe not as attractive, but more authentic - and far easier on the modeler.

Good luck.

jtilley wrote:

I haven't had my hands on that kit in many years (unfortunately; it's an excellent one).  The figure 1/160 is also the one in Dr. Graham's book, Remembering Revell Model Kits.  I think that may be on the small side, but there's no way it's as big as 1/100.  I think it's in the vicinity of 3/32" = 1', which is 1/128.

Thanks for this info, I'll add it to the database! For some reason I thought you were the one who stated the scale was 1/96 in a previous post, but I must have been wrong.

To any forum members who've downloaded my kit database, please don't treat it as too "authoritative" - much of the information in the database is either gleaned from various third-party sources (this forum being one) or, in the case of the scale of many kits, guesswork (in this case I've put a ? next to the scale number).
I have about 15-20 sailing ship kits in my collection/stash, so, given that there are almost 250 entries in the database, most of them are kits I don't have first-hand experience of - in many cases (such as most of the Pyro, Lindberg, Aurora and Imai ranges) I haven't even seen the kits myself other than on eBay.

jtilley wrote:

(Lots of other whalers did; the Morgan apparently got "port-painted" when she was being used for the filming of a movie in the 1920s.)  She now has an overall black hull - maybe not as attractive, but more authentic - and far easier on the modeler.

How anyone kept the starboard side paint job 'neat' while working the catch almost beggars the imagination.  This after we "get past" the famously frugal Yankee skippers carrying around additional paint for a two year cruise . . .

CWM is one of those kits that was always "almost" for me.  Never seemed to see one for sale when I had any money on me, and sold as soon as I had cash to spend.