HMS Shannon, 18th century frigate (1/400ish Airfix kit)

There is an American distributor for the Langton Kits, refer to http://www.brookhursthobbies.com/

 

I have the brig kit, here is the box "art"  .... 

Beautiful work EP. My very first ship model was the little Revenge, followed by the little Great Western, and then the bug bit. That was in 1964. Two great little ships but NOTHING beats the Harriet Lane. Robert 

I almost had a heart attack when I saw the price of 1/300 Victory.

 

Those Langton kits are indeed impressive; this is the first time I've heard of them.  (I don't think they have a distributor this side of the Atlantic.)  The prices are high, all right, but I'm sure the gentleman isn't getting rich from them.  It certainly makes more sense to me to spend that kind of money on products like these than on those gawdawful HECEPOB kits, which cost even more and, unless they're modified beyond recognition, don't produce scale models.

My only reservation (solely on the basis of those pictures; I haven't laid eyes on any of the actual kits) concerns the brass sails.  I'm sure they're extremely appropriate for wargamers, who seem to make up a big share of Mr. Langton's market.  But to my eye a sail, in order to look right, has to be transluscent.  No painting technique, applied to a piece of metal, can reproduce what happens to the appearance of a real sail when the light source moves behind it.  I imagine replacing the brass sails with paper ones would be a fairly straightforward job.

Thanks for the link! I've heard of Langton Miniatures before but have not visited their site. They look to have a very impressive range of 1/200 World War 1 coastal craft (more like my era and scale of interest!), both Axis and Allied. Prices (most under £10) don't seem too bad for limited-run kits, considering that WEM's 1/350 torpedo boats are at least £10 each. I might buy one or two of these in the future; the 80' ML and German coastal sub look particularly interesting.

The prices of the 1/300 Napoleonic ships are a bit intimidating, although I'm sure the kits are very detailed and high quality (the photos of built models certainly look amazing). Even the smaller ships (cutters, brigs etc.) are as much as the average large scale plastic sailing ship kit (and sailing ships from this era are pretty small in 1/300 scale; even a first-rate like the Victory isn't that big).
If you have a lot of money and not much display space, though, you could assemble a beautiful fleet of 18th century warships from this range!

Anyway, thanks for the comments on the Shannon - as I mentioned in my original post, I don't usually build sailing ships in this scale, I just built it as a fun side project (it only cost about £3 including shipping in any case). I thought it was worth building in any case, being the only plastic kit Royal Navy sail frigate (unless you count Lindberg's "La Flore" converted into HMS Surprise)

EDIT: If you want to see a real masterpiece small-scale sailing ship (under construction), look here - it's a scratchbuilt 1/700 waterline model of the brig HMS Rose. It's hard to tell from looking at the pictures that the model is only a few inches long!

Skytrex kits are pretty good, but you might also wish to have a look at the kits by Langton Miniatures (www.rodlangton.com).  They are amazing!  I have a bunch of the Anglo-Dutch wars models, and they are really a lot of fun!  They also produce a line of 1/300 resin kits of frigates, xebecs, schooners, brigs, etc, all Napoleonic, and whiule they ain't cheap, they are very accurate indeed!

I can remember this one too - in the waterline configuration.  (I don't think I've seen the full-hull version before.)  In the U.S. (or, at any rate, at Hall's Hardware in Columbus, Ohio) it was sold in the beloved Airfix plastic bag.  The heavy paper tag that sealed the bag had a color painting of the actual ship on the front, and the flags and (if I remember right) the transom windows and ornamentation on the back.  The modeler had to restrain his enthusiasm when ripping the paper off the bag; the paper was in fact folded over double, and the instructions were printed inside.  The kit also featured "shrouds and ratlines" printed in black on a sheet of thin, transparent plastic - actually not a bad idea on such a small scale.  And the "sea" base, as my nostalgia-laden memory recalls it, was quite nice. 

My recollection is that only four of the little Airfix sailing ships found their way into the stock of Hall's Hardware.  (Contrary to what the name might imply, it was a first-rate local hobby shop.  The hobby department occupied the basement of the hardware store, which was located on High Street in downtown Columbus.  I spent many a Saturday afternoon riding the bus downtown, walking the three blocks from the bus stop to Hall's, admiring the wonderful builtup models and train layout in the show window, and then descending the creaking staircase into that wonderful basement.  Ahh, memories.)  The others I can remember were the Victory (also in waterline configuration) and the full-hull versions of the Revenge and Great Western.  They obviously don't hold up terribly well by modern standards, but to a twelve-year-old kid they were pretty magnificent.  And they only cost 50 cents each - and they came all the way from England! Ahh, memories.

Fortunately, the modeler who's interested in tiny sailing ships is remarkably well-served today.  Anybody with such interests should check out the "Trafalgar Series" of cast metal kits offered by Skytrex, at www.skytrex.com .  I have their 1/700 Victory; it's an outstanding little kit.

Nice to see the old girl again. This is the second generation "Shannon". the first being a waterline model with plastic sea. I remember converting a couple of these to close (for a 15 year old) approximation of a painting of the Shannon/Chesepeake battle and doing  a table-top photo session, with battle smoke produced courtesy dad's pipe, to try get onto Airfix Mags photo page. I failed, but may still have the negative somewhere!