Aftremarket details

   Thanks all, I've ordered several books on rigging along with CSS Alabama; anatomy of a confederate raider from Amazon. com, the Alabama instructions even to me are inadequate for building this into a fine model. I'm amazed at the fine modelers here on this board can turn a plastic kit into something that closely resembles the real thing, not only the sailing ships but the modern ships and submarines as well...what a great group to mingle with.   Karl

I've had that problem with a couple of Revell Germany's instruction books, seemingly no proofing whatsoever. I really love when the numbers don't correspond to those on the sprues...

John,  yes the instruction book for the Alabama is a joke. There has to be zero quality control, which surprises me if Germans were involved, as I know them to be meticulous beyond belief. The botched sail job, quite funny indeed.

I've had a hell of a time trying to figure out more than a few things during my building of this model.

Starduster, one thing I did was to sand the small pin off, and drill out the top deadeye in order to be able to thread through it. Its worked well. I can't see how the kit supplied method could work and hold any tension at all.

I'm sure that the blue jacket deadeyes with homeade lanyards etc. would definitely look better than my method if done right. I'm planning to use them on the Cutty Sark in the future. 

   Thanks Jtilly, I just did find the Bowcock book, at the sea room book site, I'd like to do a good job and the CSS Alabama seems like a good ship to get my feet wet ( no pun intended ) as I have quite a collection of various ships among them the 1:100 Heller Victory, the Soleil royal, and the Revell 1:96 Constitution, those three will be waiting on the shelf until I'm qualified to do a respectable job on them, with all the great information that one finds here I'll most likely become a pest with questions, and I plan to submit photos as I stumble along, thanks again.   Karl

I'm a big fan of the cast metal blocks and deadeyes from Bluejacket (www.bluejacketinc.com). There's no way I can tell how many you'll need, or in what sizes. It depends on how thorough a job of rigging you do; there are lots of perfectly legitimate approaches to that question.

If you install all the standing rigging and the basic running rigging, you'll probably spend somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 on blocks and deadeyes - wherever you buy them. But, as you've noted, there's no reason in the world to buy all of them at once. My suggestion is to buy a dozen of each of the three smallest sizes of blocks and the three smallest sizes of deadeyes, take a good look at them, and compare them to your rigging plans. Then you'll be able to make an intelligent decision about what you need - and when in the construction process you need it.

If you're serious about doing a good job of rigging the model to scale, the first thing you need is a decent set of plans. The rigging diagrams that originally came with the Revell kit weren't bad, but the ones in the current Revell Germany issue are an incompetently-drawn travesty. The whole instruction book is a scandal. The moron responsible for the finished model on the front page couldn't even figure out where the vac-formed "sails" were supposed to go.

To my knowledge the best available plans of the Alabama (indeed, the only reliable ones available) are those in Andrew Bowcock's "C.S.S. Alabama: Anatomy of a Confederate Raider," published a few years ago by the Naval Institute Press. Here's a link: https://www.mca-usniforum.org/webstore/shopexd.asp?id=18770 It's an expensive book, but an excellent one. (You probably can find a better price at some other web book dealer.) Mr. Bowcock did a remarkable job of ferreting out information about that famous, but historically rather elusive, ship - including a couple of photographs that I hadn't seen before. Be warned, though: the book will make it clear just how inaccurate the Revell kit is.

Hope that helps a little. Good luck.