Artesainia Latine Surprise...

AL seems to have come a long way from when they sold my Endeaver and Mayflower kits, which looked to have wood taken from a bunch of old cigar boxes.

   Actually, I have seen some "old cigar boxes" with better quality wood!

I'd have to think long and hard before cutting up an Anatomy of the Ship volume.  On the other hand, I've got two copies of Chapelle's History of American Sailing Ships.  Both of them are cheap reprints from Bonanza Books; I think I paid about $7.50 apiece for them.  One is in like-new condition, and the other has had quite a few plans cut out of it and taped back in.

The prices of good plans nowadays vary quite a bit.  A few weeks ago my wife and I paid a visit to the U.S.S. Constitution Museum, in Boston.  It was selling sets of the plans and instructions for the Bluejacket Constitution kit for $60.00.  That's more than an Anatomy volume normally costs in the U.S. (Actually that's not a fair comparison in this particular case; the Bluejacket plans are far superior, in terms of accuracy, to the ones in the book.) 

Another example:  Harold Underhill's plans of European sailing merchantmen.  You can buy them individually for about (I think) $20.00 per sheet.  (A typical set consists of three or four sheets.  They used to be a lot cheaper, but the price went up astronomically a few years ago.)  Or you can buy a second-hand copy of Underhill's book, Deep Water Sail, which has fold-out versions of most of the same plans (dozens of them - on reduced scales, admittedly) in the back, cut the plans out of the book, copy them, and tape them back in.  If I were building a model of a ship with plans in the Underhill book, would I stoop to such a depth in order to save $60 or $80?  Yup.

jtilley wrote:

The obvious way to get good reproductions of the drawings is to cut the relevant pages out of the book.

AAAAAAArgh, blasphemy, professor, of all people, I would never have expected such a statement from you

Oh, well, I'll see what I'll receive in about 3 weeks, where there's a will, there is a way, as we say here. 

Some (not all) of the Anatomy series have outboard profiles printed on the back of the dust jacket.  I believe this is a feature that the publisher has added to the series within the last few years; I don't know whether new printings of the old volumes have such dust jackets or not.

The obvious way to get good reproductions of the drawings is to cut the relevant pages out of the book.  But I can certainly understand anybody's reluctance to to that!

jtilley wrote:

There's enough information in any of them to build a fine model from scratch - though turning the book illustrations into plans for model building would require some careful work with the copy machine.

I was under the impression (well, I think I've red somewhere) that those books came with a set of scale plans.  Anyway, if it doesn't, no problem there, since I see this more like an exercise, rather than a test And besides, since I'm rather reluctant to sawing all those bulkheads  by hand from plywood, I'm going to try something different.  But more to come on that subject when/if I'm a lot further on this than the planning/dreaming stage of this little project.

Yes, that Caldercraft-version looks like a real gem, when looking at those pictures, I immediately saw that scene from Master and Commander in my mind where they prepare for the battle and removed all those pannels in the gun-deck

Those Anatomy of the Ship books are great.  The series has hit a few bumps; the first edition of the one about the Victory had some rather big goofs in it (which got fixed in the second, revised edition), and the one about the U.S.S. Constitution has some REALLY big goofs in it.  (I hope Conway and the author do a revised version of that one, too.)  But generally they're fine books.  There's enough information in any of them to build a fine model from scratch - though turning the book illustrations into plans for model building would require some careful work with the copy machine.

I do hope the AL Surprise kit contains a set of plans, but frankly I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't.  The designers may well have concluded that those color photos - which seem to be extremely well taken - are enough.  And I agree that the lack of deck camber can probably be blamed on the manufacturer.  The bottom line, from my standpoint, is that - though I recognize that "reviewing" such a product on the sole basis of 55 photos isn't really fair - it's not the sort of thing I'm interested in buying.  It does indeed seem to be superior in lots of ways to the company's earlier efforts, but AL has a long way to go before it can be taken seriously as a producer of scale ship models.  The Calder/Jotika kit, on the other hand, looks like it's going to be one of the finest products in the industry.

Thank you for commenting on the pictures, professor. I agree that it would be unacceptable for a kit to be released without any real plans so I tend to suspect that the builder did not photograph them (maybe out of concern about copyrights ?).  As for the camber in the deck, I too fail to see it, so that may be again either a mistake by the builder (although, judging by he's work he doesn't look like a beginner) or by AL (which somehow feels more likely).

As for purchasing this kit, well, with two kids and a rather expensive other hobby (rc helicopters), I'm in no position to spent that amount of money on any kit, be it a hecepob or the highest quality-perfectly-to-scale-super-detailed kit existing or not existing yet. .

However, with all the posts about these period ships on this forum and on the dutch forum of which I'm a member as well, my fingers are itching and I have ordered the book : Anatomy of the Ship, Bomb Vessel Granado, to at least give scratchbuilding a try at wooden ship models.

The book overhere costs about 60 dollar (45 euro) and I still have plenty of woodsupplies on the attick.

So what can I loose, apart from some dignity if all goes wrong and somebody askes me about this project again in a couple months

Many thanks to DanCooper for the link.  The pictures are beautiful.

I obviously can't write a kit review on the sole basis of those pictures.  A number of points, though, do jump out from them.  I'll take the liberty of commenting on those points - with the caveat that I'm obviously limited to what's shown in the photos.  (It looks like the photographer made a pretty comprehensive effort to shoot everything in the box, but it's possible that some components aren't visible.)

To begin with, the kit is superbly packaged.  I've noted elsewhere that HECEPOB kits tend to emphasize packaging (far too often more than their contents), but it deserves to be noted that, especially if you're buying a kit that's been shipped overseas, packaging does matter.

The instruction book appears to be illustrated with lots of beautiful color photos.  And there appear to be several big sheets of numerically-keyed, overall color shots of a finished model.  But a genuine set of plans is nowhere to be seen.  Maybe the gentleman who took the pictures for the DDM website just didn't happen to photograph them.  But if the kit indeed does not contain a set of plans, that, in my judgment, renders it completely unacceptable.

Since no plans are shown, and since I don't know much about the real ship, it's difficult for me to comment on the accuracy of the kit.  But the photos do suggest a few troublesome things.  It appears, for instance, that there's no camber in the decks.  (I.e., the decks are perfectly flat, rather than rounded up slightly toward the centerline.  I'm not sure about that; it looks like the rails and windows on the transom are rounded up in the middle.  But the decks certainly look flat in several pictures.)  The pattern of the hull planking, especially below the wale (which is clearly shown in several photos), has little to do with how real ships were planked in that era, and the disposition of the butt joints in the deck planks is wrong.  (That sort of mistake always makes me wonder what the designers were thinking.  It's no more difficult to locate the butt joints in a deck properly.)

I can't tell much about the fittings, but most of them look pretty nice.  On the other hand, the turned brass gun barrels don't have much detail on them, and all of them seem to represent long guns.  (Unless I'm much mistaken, the Surprise had carronades on her quarterdeck and forecastle.)  I rather suspect those parts are recycled from other Artesania Latina kits.

The line provided for the running rigging appears to be green.  (That may, however, have something to do with the white balance setting on the camera.)

To my eye those cloth "sails" look pretty awful - but I guess that's largely a matter of taste.

The figurehead looks like a nice casting; a careful paint job would make it pretty impressive.  (On the other hand - and this is the sort of thing the people who run Drydock Models don't like to hear - in comparison with the "carved" detail routinely found in plastic kits from Heller, Revell,  Imai, and Airfix, it's downright crude.)

I question the transom decoration.  I can't claim to have definitive knowledge on this point, but I've never seen a reliable source depicting a British warship of the eighteenth century with her name above the windows.  This ship was captured from the French; maybe the French sometimes did things that way.   But I'd have to see a better source than AL's word for it before I'd believe it.

The flags are schizophrenic.  The ensign has the St. Patrick's Saltire (the diagonal red cross, added in 1801) and the jack doesn't.

One big, common complaint about HECEPOB kits is the low quality of wood they routinely provide.  On the basis of the photos I can't say much about that feature.  The wood in the photos doesn't look bad.  But it does look like AL is trying to make some things out of plywood that shouldn't be (e.g., anything that has to be bent - such as the transom components).

Artesania Latina has a wretched reputation among serious ship modelers.  (It's been referred to more than once as "Artist in the Latrine.")  I agree completely that this kit looks considerably better than some of the company's earlier offerings.  These photos, however, aren't going to make me buy it.  And that $668 price tag amounts to outright robbery.

The few photos of the new Mamoli Surprise that I've seen suggest that the Mamoli kit is probably somewhat better than this one.  (That's a bold assertion for me to make on the basis of the evidence I've got, though.)  If I were in the market for a wood H.M.S. Surprise kit, however, I'd wait for the Calder/Jotika version.  It may be even more expensive than the AL one, but the people at Calder/Jotika know what they're doing.  A member of the Forum over at Model Ship World has been keeping track of that kit's development.  Here's his latest update:  http://modelshipworld.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=24658&sid=bb2f520b24c51b1f1e363dbad706c8c5#24658appear .  Note the carronades - among other things.