Lindberg 1/64 Southern Belle Steamboat

I have fond memories of this kit.  I recall running it (with its paddle and those big crankshafts turning furiously - to the limit of the life of the old lead-acid batteries that were the only ones available in those days) on Mirror Lake, in the middle of the Ohio State campus, where my father (the first Professor Tilley) took me to sail my models when I was in elementary school.

I have no idea what - if anything - was the historical basis for the kit.  I've always assumed it was just sort of a generic steamboat design - but I don't know.  Kits like that generally seem to be based on something.

Another old kit I wouldn't mind seeing again is the Lindberg Clermont.  That one had a really ingenious propulsion system - with operating scale (well, more-or-less) piston, crosshead, and gears powered via an inconspicuous worm gear arrangement by the little Mabuchi motor and batteries concealed under the deck.

Good day Professor !

Thank you very much for the post. I bought the Southern Belle from Barcelona some 10 years ago and she was sitting idly in her box since then for lack of exhibition space. Finally I menaged to build some models impressive enough to convince my father to lease me the empty wall in the saloon for a roomy glassed locker to put my collection in  And thus Southern Belle came off from the shelf.

In the book "Warships" by Chancellor press (one of those notorious coffee table books), there is a photograph of Pittsburg landing taken in 1862; showing a file of Unionist steamboat transports. The sternwheeled one at the foremost has almost the same superstructure arrangement with the Southern Belle, though she has a pointed bow instead of a square "barge pusher" type. On the big flag at the bow, her name is written but I could not read it, perhaps I can if I shall find a magnifier.

I also have very fond memories for Lindberg Clermont. It was sold here in Turkey when I was 6 years old, as a readily built and motorized toy. From the photos I found in e-bay, I observed that it is an exact miniature of the replica built in 1907. I waited a reissue this year, in honor of the 200th anniversary of steam at sea, bu it did not came

P.S: What do you think about the campus of Ohio State, Professor ? There is a strong possibility that I'll go there for my P.h.D in a couple of years

Well, I'm the wrong person to ask about Ohio State.  My father taught architecture there for more than thirty years, and I spent seven years (1973-1980) in graduate school there.  I hated the place, and I still do.  When I left I said I'd never set foot on the campus again - and I never have.

That, of course, was a long time ago.  Those were bad times in the American history profession; we grad students were constantly being reminded that we had virtually no chance of getting teaching jobs when we graduated, and we constantly wondered why it was that the professors who held such power over us were entitled to be employed while we weren't.  Scarcely any of the faculty I knew are still in the history department, and I'm sure the overall character of the place has changed in one way or another.  But certain aspects of the institution are beyond changing:  the insanely large size (56,000 students in my day; more now, I imagine), the impersonal, computerized approach to virtually everything, and an over-emphasis on athletics bordering on criminality.  I once described OSU as "an academic sewer."  I hope things have changed since then, but I'm not optimistic.

Kapudan, you'd better ask somebody else who's been there more recently than I have.  I'm scarcely in a position to be objective about that dump.

Well, I'm hardly in a position to be objective about that one either, but yeah, I think we have a pretty good history department at ECU.  It's certainly better than it was 24 years ago, when I came here.  And I think we are, in general, considerably more interested in the education of our students than those...people...at OSU were in the late seventies.  (There were, I should emphasize, exceptions.  I made some good friends among the faculty there.)

My stepdaughter graduated from ECU three years ago.  I have to say in all honesty that if (heaven forbid) I had another kid, I wouldn't send him/her to ECU.  I'd urge him/her to spend two years in a community college, and maybe transfer to ECU for the remaining two years.  The community colleges around here give at least as good an education to freshmen and sophomores as ECU does - for about 1/5 the cost.

This thread seems to have wandered quite a bit.  My fault.  I'd really rather talk about steamboats.

I'd have to have a specific kit name to comment specifically, but generally speaking the kits sold by Model Expo are (with the obvious exception of the Model Shipways range) of the HECEPOB(that's Hideously Expensive Continental European Plank On Bulkhead) variety.  I've ranted on that subject at length here in the Forum; in the unlikely event that anybody's interested, a Forum Search on the word HECEPOB (which I am proud to have coined) will produce more than you want to read.  The bottom line is that those companies (Amati, Artesania Latina, Mamoli, Sergal, Corel, and their ilk) are in the habit of bilking the public by claiming their products are scale representations of actual vessels when, in fact they are something else (I'm not sure what).  They're generally held in pretty thorough contempt by serious scale modelers.

I always feel obliged to offer a big caveat to observations like that:  I can't claim to have examined anywhere near all the HECEPOB kits, and I'm sure there's considerable variation among them.  (Amati, in particular, seems in the past year or two to have figured out what the term "scale model" means, and has released several kits, under the "Victory Models" label, that look pretty good.)  But I wouldn't allow a kit from any of those companies in my house - let alone spend good money on it - unless and until my own eyes convinced me that the kit in question did not adhere to the abysmal standards of accuracy, materials, and construction methods that are generally characteristic of the HECEPOB species.

That goes double for the HECEPOB river boat kits I've seen.  I question whether the people who designed those kits had any idea of what a real American steamboat looked like.

I can't claim to much knowledge in this particular area, but my impression is that, at the moment, the answer is:  unfortunately, no.

The best-known riverboat kit for many years probably was the old Pyro Robert E. Lee. It wasn't a bad kit for its age (the early or mid-fifties), but by modern standards it suffered from pretty mediocre detail and dowright miserable fit.  The last time I saw an example of this kit it had a Lindberg label on it.  That was quite a few years ago; I haven't seen one in a long time.

That kit was also sold for a while under the name "Natchez."  It represented that boat so inaccurately that, for a while, Pyro was printing the phrase "the within model is similar to the Natchez, but is not an exact duplicate.  'Nuff said.

The Robert E. Lee has, of course, been a favorite among kit manufacturers.  Revell offered a small one for a long time; it was, in some respects, a little better than the Lindberg version.  (If you go in search of a Revell Robert E. Lee on e-bay, though, try to find an old one.  In the late fifties or early sixties Revell modified the mold to accommodate an electric motor and batteries.  The result was that the hull got deepened considerably - and very unauthentically.  Subsequent reissues didn't have the motor, but did have the too-deep hull.)  ITC made one many, many years ago; I don't remember much about it, except that it was far beyond my skills as a six-year-old when my parents made the mistake of buying it for me.  Bluejacket used to offer a wood Robert E. Lee, but it's been gone from the catalog for some years.  Maybe our Forum friend Al Ross can tell us something about that.

Quite a few years ago, at a Nautical Research Guild meeting, I listened to John Fryant, one of the country's most respected steamboat experts, give a talk on a model of the Lee that he'd built.  Mr. Fryant categorically stated that all the extant Robert E. Lee kits were "wrong."  He was convinced that, for instance, the real boat had a round-bottomed hull, and various other features that the model companies had missed.

There probably have been other riverboat kits, but those (along with the awful HECEPOB ones and the Lindberg Clermont and Southern Belle) are the ones I know about.  It's a shame the kit manufacturers haven't paid more attention to them.  They make wonderful models.