One of the biggest, most important decisions a modeler of this kit has to make - and, unfortunately, make pretty early in the process - is how to handle the rigging of the lower shrouds. The kit's rendition in this area is simplified almost beyond recognition. There are various ways around the problem - some of them pretty complicated, some relatively easy.
In wrassling with a problem like this, the first step is to get a good understanding of how the real thing works. A real deadeye, of course, is a round piece of wood with a groove around it and three holes drilled through it. Deadeyes are set up in pairs, with a piece of rope - the lanyard - running between them. In the Cutty Sark, the lower deadeye in each pair has an iron fitting called a strop around it. The ends of the strop are in the form of eyes, at the bottom of the deadeye. Another fitting, called a chainplate, consists of an iron rod with an eye forged at one end of it; the other end of the chainplate is welded to a rectangular iron plate. The end of the chainplate with the eye on it passes up through a hole in the pinrail. The eye in the chainplate fits between the two eyes at the bottom of the deadeye strop. A big iron bolt runs through all three eyes, and is secured with a nut on its end.
The iron plate welded to the bottom end of the chainplate is riveted to the inside of the ship's bulwark. (In the case of the mizzen mast, that arrangement is hidden under the poop deck; the deadeyes appear to be fastened directly to the deck.)
The upper deadeye is seized into a bight on the lower end of the shroud, which is made of twisted wire. The seizings are made of rope; there are three on each shroud, and they're coated with white paint. (I think those seizings may be the cylinders referred to above. Or maybe not. See below.) The upper end of the shroud passes up through the "lubber hole" in the top (the platform at the head of the lower mast), has a rope seizing wrapped around it to keep the loop tight, and runs down to the upper deadeye in the next pair. (Exception: when there's an odd number of shrouds in a gang, the first one goes all the way around the mast and runs down to the first deadeye in the other side.)
The shrouds are "parcelled and served" throughout their length. That means they're wrapped in a spiral pattern with strips of thin canvas, and then wound tightly with twine. The whole mess is then coated with "blackening," a concoction containing tar and lampblack that makes the shroud, if not pure black, pretty close to it.
The lanyard is a piece of rope that runs between the holes in the upper and lower deadeyes. It has a big knot tied in one end (a "Matthew Walker" or "double crown" knot), and is passed through the lefthand hole in the upper deadeye (as viewed from inboard). It then passes from hole to hole, and gets knotted around the two parts of the shroud right above the upper deadeye (with a knot called a "cow hitch"). There's two feet of space between the upper and lower deadeyes of the lower shrouds and, rather surprisingly, three feet between those of the various other deadeye pairs in the ship.
There's one other fitting associated with the lower shrouds: the fairlead. (Maybe this is the cylinder Mr. Wilkinson referred to earlier.) It's a flat, cylindrical block of wood with a groove around it, a vertical (i.e., parallel to the axis) groove at one point on the circumference, and either one, two, or three holes drilled through it. It's lashed to the shroud a few feet above the deadeye seizings, with the shroud lying in the vertical groove and the lashing wrapped around the circumferential groove. Various pieces of running rigging run through the holes in the fairlead; its function is to keep those line from getting tangled up with each other (i.e., to make sure they lead fair).
The ratlines are made of light rope. Each end of each ratline has an eye splice worked into it; the eyesplice is seized to the shroud. (On the fore and main masts only every fifth ratline extends to the foreward shroud; the others stop with shround no. 2. We've had some interesting discussions of why that's the case; the bottom line in my personal case is that I don't know.) Each ratline is secured to each intermediate shroud with a clove hitch.
Just in case anybody hasn't figured it out already - I'm typing all this with a copy of Mr. Campbell's plans in front of me. This sort of stuff is much easier to understand in the form of a drawing than verbally.
Now - how does one represent all this gear in 1/96 scale? I frankly don't like the way Revell did it much. Those "combo units" (combining the deadeyes and lanyards) look pretty hokey, and the deadeyes are too far apart. The big plastic blobs under the lower deadeyes that connect them to the pinrails are conspicuously out of scale, and there's no attempt to represent the chainplates. And of course the shrouds and ratlines are represented with plastic-coated thread, which some modelers defend but which I wish Revell had never invented.
I can offer some suggestions. (Caveat: I haven't tried them. The last time I built this kit was a long, long time ago, before I understood its limitations and inaccuracies.) One could, I suppose, reproduce the chainplates, deadeye strops, etc. to scale. But they'd be mighty small. (The biggest deadeyes in the ship - those on the lower fore and main shrouds, are 10" in diameter. That's slightly less than 1/8" on the scale.) And the space under the pinrails will be almost invisible when the model's done. A good way to fake the lower deadeye fastenings might be to run pieces of brass or copper wire around the deadeyes, drill holes in the pinrail where the deadeyes are going to be, pass the wires through the holes, and superglue the ends of the wires to the bottom of the pinrail. (You could, in fact, use strong, black thread; run a length of it all along the underside of the pinrail, with loops passing up through the holes and snagging the deadeyes.)
In any case, I strongly recommend reinforcing those pinrails in some way - maybe with steel pins running through the bulwarks, and/or wires running diagonaly downward from the inboard edge of the pinrail to the waterway (the junction of the bulwark and the deck). Lots of lines are going to be secured to those pinrails, and if you yank just a little too hard on one of the lines and the pinrail comes loose....
I'd recommend making the shrouds out of thread; as we discussed earlier, the visual difference between it and wire at this scale is negligible. (Especially when you consider the parcelling and serving. I don't think I've ever seen a 1/96-scale model with its rigging actually parcelled and served.)
And the ratlines can be done more-or-less to scale. Eyesplicing thread at that scale isn't practicable, but clove-hitching it is. (My personal preference is to tie the ends of each deadeye with reef knots and the intervening ones with clove hitches.) The Cutty Sark, with a maximum of five shrouds per gang, actually isn't a bad model to learn the mysterious (and ludicrously over-rated) art of ratline rigging. We've discussed the subject of ratlines many times here in the Forum. Please believe me - by comparison with plenty of other tasks involved in this model, it's easy.
By the way - the subject of knots is a huge and fascinating one. But the truth of the matter is that in building a ship model you really only need to know two knots: the reef knot (known to Boy Scouts as the square knot) and the clove hitch. They are just about the two simplest knots in the world to tie. (You may also find occasional use for the slip knot - which is just a simple variation on the reef knot. For the knot at the end of a deadeye lanyard, just tie several reef knots on top of each other.)
There are various ways to represent the fairleads (which lots of modelers omit). Consider buying some extremely small deadeyes and filing grooves for the shrouds in them. Or extremely small bullseyes. (A bullseye is like a deadeye, but with only one hole through it. Bluejacket's smallest bullseyes are smaller than its smallest deadeyes.) Here's an application for one of the golden rules of ship modeling, though: it's better to leave it off than to make it too big.
I personally find the setting up of deadeye lanyards just about the nastiest job in rigging a ship model. It's particularly tricky because, almost by definition, it has to happen quite early in the rigging process. (I've rigged more ship models than I can count, but by the time I start rigging another one I'm always woefully out of practice - and I usually screw up a few sets of deadeyes before my poor old fingers get back into training.) I've tried various tricks for jigging the deadeyes at the right spacing, but nothing seems to work as well as (1) plain old practice and (2) trial and error. The challenge is to get all the upper deadeyes lined up parallel to the rail, and all the shrouds at the same tension.
And yeah, it would be an excellent idea to reinforce the jibboom. (The designers had that one figured out right. The bowsprit, strictly speaking, is the lower of the two spars that stick out from the bow. In the real ship it's made of iron. The jibboom, which is wood, lies on top of the bowsprit for the latter's full length. At the end of the bowsprit a heavy iron fitting called the bowsprit cap clamps the jibboom and bowsprit together; it would take a huge amount of force to break the jibboom off at the cap. But our dear friends at Revell, rather than mold the jibboom in its full length and having the modeler glue it to the top of the bowsprit, made the jibboom in two pieces, with the joint at the cap (the worst possible place, from the standpoint of strength). My suggestion: 1. Cut off the pin on the inner end of the jibboom. 2. get a piece of piano wire about 1/2" or maybe 3/4" long and about 1/16" in diameter. 3. Drill a hole slightly larger than the piano wire in the jibboom (where the pin used to be), and an identical hole in the end of the bowsprit (or, more correctly, in the end of the part of the jibboom that's molded integrally with the bowsprit. 4. Superglue the wire into one hole. 5. Superglue the two parts of the jibboom together. The resulting joint won't be cat-, dog-, or kid-proof, but it should withstand any civilized force that's applied to it.
Hope all that helps a little. Good luck.