I don't know much about the ship side of things, but I have had excellent luck communicating with RoG here...

http://www.revell.de/en/company/contact/index.html?&L=1

This should at least let your thoughts be heard...

You might be right... But then again, Heller/Aurora used to make a whacking big Chebec (1/50 scale?), but of course Heller is on the ropes, as is Airfix too, i recall... Still haven't figured out how to insert photos here....

I'm relieved (and not a little surprised) to get my recollections on those points confirmed.  A 57-year-old memory is a strange thing.  I can remember stuff like how those copper plates were indicated on a kit I haven't laid eyes on in at least 25 years (a piece of trivia if there ever was one) - and I have trouble remembering the names of the students in my current classes.  Weird.

I have to say that I've always been impressed by the way the Revell people represented the copper sheathing on their other big models - the Cutty Sark, Constitution, etc.  The "overlap" is, of course, out of scale all right, but with a nice paint job it can be made to look pretty convincing.  But I'm sure the same can be said about the technique they used on the America.  To each his own.

A hull twice as big as the extant version would, I think, be considerably bigger than any individual part that Revell has ever made.  I'm not sure it could be done with the injection-moldeing process and the type of styrene Revell normally uses.  Fiberglass or some sort of resin probably would be a more appropriate material.  It's a neat idea, but I wonder if Revell actually is the right company to approach about it.

By the way, I'd like to include some photos to these posts, but haven't figured out how to do it yet!

The comment about the copper plates for the bottom is true.  However, given the thinness of the plates of the original, any attempt to make an overlapping appearance would simply be way out of scale.  The rig of the original is also very simple in comparison with later schooners, which really lends itself to beginning modellers, as well as more experienced people (how many 1/96 Constitutions and Cutty Sarks have been abandoned by the young, simply because of the complexity of the rigging task?).

  It is also important to remember that even today, model manufacturers make enormous blunders (think of the Hasegawa Nagato in 1/350, which has the CAD lines heavily engraved across the WHOLE of the hull, not to mention the heavily raised joins on the exterior 'sunscreen' plates on the Aoshima Takao turrets; inexcusable!!).  The America sails are made out of some sort of peculiar 'plasticized' paper, which makes it waterproof, yet still flexible enough to add some measure of realism (vastly superior to the usual vacuformed plastic monstrosities) and sailing functionality.  Yes, there is a small removable keel as well, which does help sailing performance a lot, and since you can slide it up and down the length of the true keel, you can get the boat to sail better according to the direction of the wind.  The only real problem involves ballasting, which requires a lot to balance the hull properly for actual sailing (best to stuff the remainder of the hull with styrofoam 'peanuts' to ensure the boat doesn't sink if caught by a strong puff of wind!).  Obviously, a new edition in a much larger scale would allow for some useful upgrades (cloth sails, and separate mast-hoops maybe?), especially a detachable keel with a hollow compartment at the bottom for ballast would be most suitable.

 

 

 

We had a good discussion of the Revell Batavia kit some time back here in the Forum; another member posted some pictures.  I agree:  it certainly looks like a nice kit.  (For the record - the one in Holland is a replica, built in the 1980s.  I was lucky enough to get a look at her while she was under construction, when I was over there for a conference in '87.  I don't know whether the Revell kit is based on the replica; I imagine it is.) 

My only real criticism of that old America kit was that, in a few respects, it wasn't quite up to the standards of the best earlier Revell sailing ships.  For example, if I remember correctly (a highly dubious proposition these days) the "copper sheathing" was represented by raised lines outlining the "plates," whereas the earlier kits (even those on much smaller scales) showed the "overlap" of the plates pretty convincingly.  I may be wrong about that, though; I haven't seen one of the kits in a good many years.

Dr. Graham's Remembering Revell Model Kits gives the original release date of the America kit as 1969.  His appendix adds the note, "Flexible, tough paper sails that allowed the model to be sailed on ponds."  (I have a very vague recollection that it also included a small plastic keel extension - probably too small to make much of a difference.  I may be mistaken about that, though.)  Apparently it was only reissued once - as the "Civil War Blockader" in 1974.  (Caveat:  Dr. Graham's coverage stops in 1979.  Maybe it got reissued again after that, but I certainly don't remember it.)  The very late sixties and the early seventies were a rough time for Revell - for a variety of reasons, ranging from the waning popularity of the hobby among kids to a changing of the guard in the company management.  (One of the founders developed cancer and turned over his position to his wife, who did such things as bringing in a remedial reading teacher from a local school to rewrite instruction sheets.  She also was instrumental in a number of disastrously expensive ideas that turned into duds financially - e.g., licensed models of the Beatles.)  Dr. Graham doesn't say much about how well that series of "simplified" sailing ships (including the America) performed in the market place, but reading between the lines a bit it looks like they weren't big sellers.

Any discussion of that ship makes me think of an anecdote about the museum where I used to work (the Mariners' Museum, Newport News, Va.).  It happened some years before I got there, but people were still talking about it.  A gentleman - a perfect stranger - showed up at the admissions desk one day with a question about something or other, and the admissions clerk summoned Harold Sniffen, one of the curators (and one of the finest gentlemen I've ever met).  Harold went out to the front desk and invited the gentleman to his office, where they discussed the questions (whatever it was) and then took a quick tour of the storage area to take a look at some artifact or other.  The gentleman said "thank you very much for your time," and left. 

Harold thought no more about the incident until a week or two later, when a big box got delivered to the museum.  A note inside said, "Since you were so courteous and generous with your time when I visited your museum, I thought you might like this.  It's been in our family for years."  It was an old half-model of the yacht America.  Mounted on the backboard was a little silver plaque reading, "This model of the America was presented by her designer, George Steers, to Her Majesty, Queen Victoria." 

Needless to say, the model became one of the museum's prize possessions.  At the time I started work at the museum (in 1980), that story was used to illustrate a rule among the curators:  "whenever a visitor asks a question, drop whatever you're doing and answer it - and roll out the red carpet.  You never know what the consequences may be."  In recent years, unfortunately, the museum seems to have abandoned that policy.

Several of our Forum participants have tried in recent years to get into intelligent discussions about ship models with the people at Revell Germany.  So far as I know, nobody at the company has ever condescended to answer any such inquiry.  I have the distinct impression that the current management of the company doesn't really know much, if anything, about sailing ships.  But things do change; maybe you'll have better luck.

Yup, this is why I was interested in speaking with the ROG folks, as the American ones are pretty much a waste of space.  ROG put out a quite good kit about ten years ago called 'Batavia,' which i recommend you have a look at.  It is a 17th century VOC ship, which I thought was quite well done (and the real one is in Holland, which is nice for comparison).  Revell used to be quite good at the large scale ship models, and I love the 'America' model for a couple reasons.  Not only is it very well molded and quite accurate, but the wide beam design of the ship itself really lends itself to RC functionality (the model itself can be sailed with the addition of ballast, but would be better with a weighted keel).  If ROG came out with this in a larger scale, say, twice the size produced originally, you could have not only an outstanding dispay piece, but could get a lot of kids (and adults!) down to the park on a Sunday too.  I have actually picked up four of the old Revell kits, and have been building them in different color schemes (one of them is the 'Civil War Blockader,' which is simply America with an extra jib and foretopsail), and all of them look brilliant (a tribute not only to the old Revell, but the original designer of America as well!)!

That was indeed a nice old kit, and one I'd be more than happy to see again.  But it's just one on a rather long list of Revell sailing ships in that category.  Others I'd like to see again:  the Charles W. Morgan, Golden Hind, Mayflower, Flying Cloud, and Great Eastern (if you can call that one a sailing ship).  

But I have to say I'm not optimistic.  Both the American and German sides of the Revell operation are notoriously unresponsive to individual modelers - and they seem to have almost completely lost interest in sailing ships.  The material on this part of the hobby in Dr. Thomas Graham's fine book, Remembering Revell Model Kits, makes for depressing reading.  Revell released its first sailing ship, the 1/192 Constitution, in 1956, and the last one, the nice little Viking ship, in 1977.  (Revell Germany has done a handful of others since then, but the Viking ship was the last one from Revell of the U.S.)  The company has, in other words, now been out of the sailing ship business longer than it was in it.

The current Revell-Monogram catalog makes depressing reading for ship modelers.  It contains nine (count 'em - nine) ships.  Two of them are sailing ships.  Both represent the same ship:  the U.S.S. Constitution.  One of those two kits is more than fifty years old; the other more than forty.  The only ship kit on the list that can be called "new," or even "recent," is the excellent 1/72-scale Gato-class submarine.  The others are the 1/400 Enterprise (ex-Aurora kit from the early 1960s), Arizona (1958), Titanic (1976), PT-109 (1963), 1/185-scale Gato-class submarine (1971), and the pride of the fleet, the nearly fossilized U.S.S. Missouri (Revell's very first ship kit, originally released in 1954).  What a list, for a company that used to claim leadership in the world of plastic ship models. 

The Revell Germany ship catalog is a little bigger, but its sailing ship roster is only slightly more impressive.  Various other threads in this Forum have established pretty firmly that the people running the company these days (a) don't know much about sailing ships, and (b) care less about them.  One of their most recent contributions to the field was the reissuing of the notorious "H.M.S. Beagle" kit of 1961.  This...thing...is utterly notorious among scale ship modelers.  It is in fact a marketing scam - a slightly modified version of Revell's ancient H.M.S. Bounty.  (The real Bounty and Beagle, as we've noted repeatedly here in the Forum, resembled each other only in that each had a hull, a deck, and three masts.  I strongly suspect the people at Revell Germany had no idea what they were looking at when they decided to reissue the Revell U.S.A. monstrosity.)   

There is, however, one small cause for optimism.  A couple of months ago Revell Germany re-released the Viking ship kit.  (It is, in fact, an excellent one.  It's actually a reasonably accurate scale model of the Gokstad Ship, one of the two major surviving vessels of the Norse era.  The Revell designers, according to Dr. Graham, worked from a full-sized reproduction of the Gokstad Ship that crossed the Atlantic in the early twentieth century, and used to be on public exhibition in Chicago.)  I found one in a local hobby shop last week and bought it as a Christmas present for my grandson, in the fond hope of getting him at least a little bit interested in ship modeling. 

I fervently hope that reissued Viking ship sells well, and that such success will persuade one or both Revells to reissue some more classic ship kits.  Searat, if you get a positive response (or any response at all) from Revell I'll be delighted.  But I'm not holding my breath.