IMAI 1/150 metal HMS Victory? Anyone seen one?

I saw one many years ago in a hobby shop in a suburb of Philadelphia.  (What we have here is yet another demonstration of my highly eccentric memory - which has trouble remembering things that happened yesterday.)  It struck me at the time as one of the most irrational ideas ever to hit the model industry. 

The hull consisted of two white metal (i.e., probably lead alloy) castings; the rest of the parts, if I remember correctlly, were plastic.  (The spars may have been wood; I'm not sure.)  The detail on the hull half castings was nothing special; in terms of things like the planking seams and the copper sheathing the kit was not as well detailed as the Revell one (which is only slightly smaller).  The clerk in the hobby shop acted as though there was something special and wonderful about this thing, but I have no idea what.  Why on earth should metal be a "better" material than styrene for a model of a ship that was made of wood?

Apparently the ridiculous thing didn't sell.  (I don't remember the price, but it was far more expensive than the comparable plastic kits of the era.)  Come to think of it, Imai went out of business not long after.  That was a shame.  The Imai plastic sailing ship kits (e.g., the Cutty Sark were some of the best ever.  But this thing, so far as I could tell, was an utter dud.

Hey, I  thought the Revell Victory was actually somewhere in the area of 1/2xx

So if the IMAI kit is only slightly larger than it is not 1/150. I mean there is no companion in scale to Heller's 1/150 French 74s Glorieux and Superb

 

I'm basing my comments on the Imai Victory entirely on memory of something I looked at for a few minutes about twenty-five years ago.  Take them with a huge grain of salt.

The little Revell kit is indeed somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/16" = 1' (1/192).  It dates from the 'fifties, when Revell was making its kits "fit the box" rather than using standardized scales.  My recollection is that the Imai metal kit was a few inches longer.  It may well have been on 1/150 scale; frankly I was so busy trying to figure out why in heaven's name any manufacturer would produce such a thing that I didn't pay much attention to the dimensions.  As I remember it was a pretty crude kit - and outrageously over-priced.  In terms of detail it certainly didn't come close to either Revell's or Heller's products.  The impression I got was that the manufacturer was trying out the concept of a metal-hulled sailing ship kit.  I've never been able to figure out why.

One just sold on Ebay, Item #6023693967. Image provided. Size is 649mm. Perhaps to include spars. I thought it would make a good companion to the 1/150 Heller 74s. Of course one of those 74s could be RN since so many were captured and re-used.

 

There was one in my LHS that has been there since the early 70's.  It always had a high price tag on it.  It was a multi-media kit that was going to be more hasle than enjoyment.  I was offered the kit for next to nothing but it just wasn't worth putting the time into it.

The hull was in three casted pieces.  The deck too was cast lead alloy which was really soft and hard to handle.  The plastic was brittle and modled in red, black, and cream.  The wood was very poor quality.

Details were far and few and one would have to invest in aftermarket hardware for the rig.

Scott

Can you tell me, if there was a "full plastic" Victory model by Imai ?

Thank you.

Michel

 

If I remember, the Imai sailing ship kits appeared over a relatively brief span (three or four years) in the very late seventies and early eighties.  That period coincides with a gap in my familiarity with the plastic sailing ship market.  (I was devoting most of my model building time to my scratchbuilt Hancock, and as a starving student - and later an even more seriously starving museum curator - I didn't have the money to buy many kits.)  I can only remember buying the 1/125 Cutty Sark and a few of the 1/350 school ships.  My recollections of the whole line are even less reliable than most of my recollections. 

That said, I certainly don't remember an Imai Victory (apart from that bizarre metal-hulled one.)  I remember a couple of sail/steam-powered ships, the Susquehanna and the Napoleon, but no traditional sailing warships.  I may be mistaken about that, though.

The legitimate plastic Victory kits I can remember are (1) the big Heller one, (2) the 18" (or thereabouts) Airfix one, (3) the little 6" (or thereabouts) Airfix one (which I think may have made an appearance as a "ship in a bottle"), and (4) the Revell one.  I seem to recall a few others that were on the market briefly.  UPC, I believe, offered one that was on the same scale as the Revell version.  The parts were interchangeable with Revell's, but the detail was a little cruder.  (Sort of like the Academy and Tamiya 1/350 versions of the Bismarck.  UPC, like Academy, functioned primarily as a distributer of kits from East Asia.) 

And I think Lindberg made two.  One was part of a small series of with hull lengths of about 8", which pretty clearly were reduced scale pirated versions of larger Revell kits.  (The others in the series, as I remember, were the Santa Maria, Flying Cloud, and Bounty.  The Flying Cloud even had Revell-style rope coils molded into its deck.)  The freakish thing about that particular Victory was that some great genius in the design department, perhaps wanting to make the kit's Revell origins less conspicuous, managed to leave off the lower row of windows in the transom and quarter galleries.  (I remember sawing off the lower part of the hull, including the lower gundeck, in an effort to make the thing look like a 74-gun ship.  Not much success.)  And I think - but I'm by no means certain - that Lindberg also made a tiny Victory, with a hull length of about 3".  That one was in another series (I recall that it also included a Cutty Sark) that was molded in "imitation bronze" - i.e., a strange green plastic with metallic gold swirls in it.

That makes seven plastic Victory kits.  Maybe some other Forum member knows of more.

Thank you John,

here is what I posted in my website (but of course, it is not complete,any information can help).

http://www.hmsvictoryscalemodels.be/MODELS_EN.htm

I did not know, there was another Lindberg model. Also, I do not know much about the "Zvezda" 1/180 scale HMS Victory.  Maybe this is just the Airfix model for the east European market?

Michel

 

Michel - My recollection of that smaller Lindberg kit is extremely vague.  It may in fact be a figment of a senile imagination.  The three-colored one you mention on your website is, I think, the one with the missing row of stern windows.

The pictures of kit boxes on your website are extremely interesting.  I notice the UPC box  claims the kit is on 1/400 scale.  If that's true, the company must have issued two kits.  The one I remember was the same size as the Revell one - i.e., somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/200.

The picture on that UPC box may just be the most awful painting of the ship ever made.  One little curiosity:  the artist (who obviously knew practically nothing about European sailing ships) duplicated a mistake that appears in the original Revell box art.  He fastened the heads of the square sails to the footropes, rather than the yards.  (Pretty funny, if you think about it a minute.)  I suspect the Japanese artist was using the Revell box art as his sole reference.

At about that same time (the mid- to late sixties, I think) UPC made a magnificently dreadful kit that allegedly represented H.M.S. Prince.  Most of its parts (the decks, guns, spars, etc.) were recycled from the Victory kit; about the only new components were the hull halves.  The box art on that one was downright hilarious.  The artist apparently had worked from a photo of the old Board Room model in the Science Museum of London.  That model, of course, has no planking below the wales.  Neither did the ship in the painting - despite the fact that it was depicted floating in a harbor, surrounded by other, equally skeletal warships.  The artist had meticulously rendered the blue sky in the background where it showed between the frames.

I don't know much about Zvezda, but I think it has a connection of some sort with Heller (which, of course, has a connection with Airfix).  I believe the old Heller Potemkin and Aurora kits are now being sold under the Zvezda label.  For the Airfix Victory to do the same would be logical.  If you can find a photo of the actual model, the common origin will be easy to spot.  The Airfix kit's bow is severely distorted; the figurehead sits about one deck too low.

Interesting stuff.  That great old ship has suffered more than her share of abuse from model manufacturers over the years.