1/350 Gorch Fock

Quite a bit of information about this ship is available.  Here's a start:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorch_Fock_(1958)

The Minicraft 1/350 is a reissue of one originally made by the excellent Japanese manufacturer Imai back in the mid-1970s.  It was one in a series of sailing schoolship kits released in an effort to capitalize on the "tall ship" craze that went along with the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976.  The kits are, considering their tiny size, excellent.

Good luck.

Thank you for the information! ( I should have remembered Wikipedia).

He was saying that the sails are all on one sheet of plastic(?) and need to be cut out individually. So instead he's thinking of opting for polyester sails that he wants to make. Yay or nay?

I was reading in another post that if the sails weigh too much on a model boat it will pull on the rigging and have the rigging droop or sag. I know polyester is pretty light though. Will the polyeser effect the "look" of the sails or is there something you can coat them with to add to the look?

Here's my somewhat limited experience with cloth sails, and trying to model with original materials in general.

It can be successful only if you overcome the scale problem. Without too much research into cloth thickness, imagine a piece of typing paper is about 0.004 inches. multiply that by 350 and it would be 1.4 inches thick. So a piece of cloth, which would not be much thinner than paper and still be practical to cut and shape, from which a little sail is made, is a pretty thick slab. It wouldn't be able to have realistic shape.

Real sails have reef points and reinforcing, plus hemmed edges and a sometimes built in billow. Any of that cannot be replicated in such a small scale, and only in large scales with a lot of craftsmanship.

I did not understand the weight of sail issue, it seemed to me that tension in the rigging would be a bigger issue, but it's true that plastic yards have no stiffness at all, compared to wood. Another example of scaling.

I'm impressed if you took that on, but.. I made a cloth sail for a 1/50 scale Dhow, a single piece about 12" on a side triangle, and I worked at it for a month. And the bigger the easier to be accurate.

Try doing one, if she has a fore/aft sail. I'm guessing the square sails are about 1" tall by 3" wide, which is a little slip of a thing.

Furled sails are easier by far, and bare poles are a good look too. But don't discard those vacform sails, if you don't want them someone else will, because the old ones fall apart.

Bill

Whether, and how, to make sails is one of the biggest and most controversial issues among sailing ship modelers - and has been for at least a hundred years.  As in most cases, there's now single right answer, and there's plenty of room for personal opinion and interpretation.  There is, however, a pretty general consensus that, on tiny scales like 1/350, it's just not practicable to make sails out of any form of cloth.

Here's a link to a rather lengthy Forum thread in which we talked out the subject pretty thoroughly:  /forums/350912/ShowPost.aspx

For what it's worth, in slightly more than fifty years of ship modeling my own personal approach has been to give up on trying to represent "set" sails - especially in small scales.  (By "small" I mean anything smaller than about 3/16"=1'.  I've never built a model on that big a scale, but if I ever did I'd seriously think about putting sails on it.)  I am, however, a big believer in "furled"
sails.  That other Forum thread contains some suggestions on how to make them.  For what little it's worth, here are three examples:  http://www.hmsvictoryscalemodels.be/johntilleygallery.htm

Frankly, if I were building any of those little 1/350 ex-Imai school ships I'd probably rig it without sails.  (I certainly wouldn't even consider using the plastic ones.)  If I did decide to put sails on it, I'd either show them furled or, if I was determined to show them set, make them from extremely thin paper - such as drafting vellum.  It can be done.  If anybody doubts that paper sails can be made to look authentic, take a look at this site:  http://www.donaldmcnarryshipmodels.com/24.html

The bottom line:  it's all up to the original modeler.  Good luck.

Here is a link to some pictures of my 1/350 USCG Eagle.This is the sister ship to the Gorch Fock.

/forums/610314/ShowPost.aspx

 I made mine without the sails.