Heller 1/100 Victory

Whenever the subject of Heller's Le Soleil Royal comes up I feel...well, a little awkward.  It must be one of the most controversial ship model kits ever produced.  I'm among those who...well, are not in its fan club.  (I would describe it as an outstanding example of artistry and artisanship in terms of the quality of the "carved" ornamentation, and a piece of junk in terms of historical accuracy.  I built it about thirty years ago; by the time I was finished with it I was wishing I hadn't spent the money.)

Here's one of the several Forum threads in which we've discussed it:   /forums/p/68138/1069433.aspx?PageIndex=1 .  (For some reason I have trouble getting the first page of the thread to open.  I have no idea why; maybe other people's computers won't have that problem.)  You'll find lots of opinions on both sides of the fence there.  I've never contended that anybody ought to build, or decline to build, a kit solely on the basis of my personal opinion.  I do suggest taking a careful look at the arguments on both sides.  I'd never presume to tell any modeler what kits to build, but I do think every modeler is entitled to go into a project like this with eyes wide open.  If I'd known in advance about the numerous gross inaccuracies of the Heller Soleil Royal I never would have bought the kit. 

A couple of pieces of information have come up since we started that other thread.  One - Heller has reissued the kit with a new painting on the box; the artist seems to agree with those people (including me) who contend that Heller botched up the quarter galleries.  Two - there's an interesting article about French seventeenth-century warships in the latest issue of the Nautical Research Journal.  The author (whose name I've forgotten, but who obviously knows how to do research) peremptorily dismisses the Musee de la Marine model (on which the Heller kit obviously is based), on the grounds that it disagrees in key respects with the designer's plans that the museum also holds.  He refers to those plans only in passing.  If they do indeed exist, they should throw a whole new light on the subject of the Heller kit's accuracy.

Bottom line (with which, I think, virtually all the participants in that earlier thread would agree):  the 1/100 Victory, which was released several years later, is, from the standpoint of scale modeling, a much, MUCH better kit.  I personally recommend the Victory kit (IF the modeler is willing to (a) do quite a bit of additional reading beyond the awful instructions and (b) spend a considerable amount of money on aftermarket parts).  I can't recommend the Soleil Royal.

Bondo,

Check your PM box, I sent a question.

Jake

Grem56

 

You are a brave man sir ! The Heller Victory has been in my stash for 3 years now and I haven't built up the nerve to wade in and start the build. I will be following your build with exceptional interest

Cheers,

Julian

I have not built the Victory, but I am building what may be considered a sister kit, the Le Soliel Royale. I consider those two kits to be the best plastic ship kits ever.  I am building to no schedule and only work on it for periods, with other kits between those periods. I have started rigging now, so the periods of building are even shorter than on hull and deck building.  Go ahead and start it, at least, then have a shelf where you can store it when you get burned out and need to do simpler projects for sanity.  Oh, yes, have a place to store the box, 'cause that is one big box, and it doesn't fit on my "interim-WIP" shelving.

bondoman

I just bought this for a very fair price. What's the one most comprehensive reference ?

Virgin Atlantic to London. Train to Portsmouth, Cab to the dock. Good digital camera & tripod.

Their website is an alternative starting point:

http://www.hms-victory.com/index.php

Geoff

The goal of this build will be a ship model built in total by the end of the year 2011.

There will be an ordinary effort to be accurate at a specific date (unknown) but that which the kit designers looked to replicate.

Little or no  additional, aftermarket as it were, or hardware will be either employed or copied, save single circumstances where the kit pieces are not up to Navy standards. Probably all of the running rigging.

You are a brave man sir ! The Heller Victory has been in my stash for 3 years now and I haven't built up the nerve to wade in and start the build. I will be following your build with exceptional interest

Cheers,

Julian

Don Stauffer

EPinniger:

 

Don Stauffer:

 

in addition to the books jtilley recommended (and a good list, too), I remember seeing a great web site. I did not bookmark the site but I am sure it would come up easily in a Google search.

 

 

Is it this one?

http://pete-coleman.com/forum/

Definitely a useful resource in any case, as this site/forum deals specifically with the Heller 1/100 kit. The only downside is that the photos are missing from some of the older threads.

 

Nope, it was a different page, nothing about modeling, all about the prototype.  Seems to me it was by the organization that runs the museum.

 

Sounds like the ship's website:  www.hms-victory.com .

If there's another major site dealing with the actual ship, I'd be interested to know about it. 

EPinniger

 

Don Stauffer:

 

in addition to the books jtilley recommended (and a good list, too), I remember seeing a great web site. I did not bookmark the site but I am sure it would come up easily in a Google search.

 

 

Is it this one?

http://pete-coleman.com/forum/

Definitely a useful resource in any case, as this site/forum deals specifically with the Heller 1/100 kit. The only downside is that the photos are missing from some of the older threads.

Nope, it was a different page, nothing about modeling, all about the prototype.  Seems to me it was by the organization that runs the museum.

Well, I didn't quite follow all that, but I'll offer this in response.

The Heller designers clearly were trying to represent the ship's configuration as of 1805.  In my personal opinion they did a pretty good job of it - with one likely (but not certain) exception:  the configuration of the forecastle bulwarks.  (There's a lot of evidence to suggest that in 1805 they were shoulder-high, rather than knee-high.  Lots of modelers have complained that the kit lacks the ornate entry ports on the middle gundeck that the ship has today; I'm inclined to think Heller got that one right.  But I'm not sure.)

The big problem with building that kit out of the box is that the blocks and deadeyes are just about unusable.  Styrene plastic has to be molded in rigid molds, and a rigid mold can't produce an object with holes through it and a groove around it.  (The geniuses at Imai did figure out how to do the trick using slide-molding, but Heller didn't.)  I guess it would be physically possible to file grooves around all those blocks and deadeyes, but I certainly wouldn't want to try it.  Aftermarket blocks and deadeyes (my favorites are the cast Britannia metal ones from Bluejacket:  www.bluejacketinc.com ) would cost more than the kit did - but there's no reason to order all of them at the same time.

I personally couldn't build that kit in a year and a half, but anybody who wants to try it certainly has my best wishes.

Tilley's books 1 and 3 have been ordered. Total cost $ 71 or so.

Ship on the way at $ 90 plus/minus

Thanks for the weblinks.

In def to the professor, and as I have two MS students in my house living off of our weal, I glean that a proposal is in order:

The goal of this build will be a ship model built in total by the end of the year 2011.

There will be an ordinary effort to be accurate at a specific date (unknown) but that which the kit designers looked to replicate.

Little or no  additional, aftermarket as it were, or hardware will be either employed or copied, save single circumstances where the kit pieces are not up to Navy standards. Probably all of the running rigging.

There will be a separate thread, which will be ignored in a similar fashion as this one will, but a bookish,. and yes we know the men are illiterate, thing called Tails of the Queue, with references and footnotes in Turabian.

The ship's own website is also very much worthy of attention:  http://www.hms-victory.com/ .

A section of the site is designed specifically for models, and contains some information that's more up-to-date than the books.  (In conjunction with the Trafalgar bicentennial, in 2005, a good deal of high-powered research on the ship's appearance was done; the ship's website probably reflects the results of that research better than any other source.

On the other hand, the modeler should beware that some features of the ship today are most definitely not true to her appearance when she was in active service.  Her masts are now made of steel.  (That probably explains why the portions of the topmasts and topgallant masts where the yards slide are painted yellow, rather than being unpainted, oiled wood.)  And, perhaps most conspicuously, her hull planking today is much simplified from the "anchor-stock" planking of the wales in her earlier days. 

In any case, the site is worth considerable study.

Thanks for the recco's. I'll start with no.s 1 and 3, looks like I can get both for about $ 75.00 which works for me.

Don Stauffer

in addition to the books jtilley recommended (and a good list, too), I remember seeing a great web site. I did not bookmark the site but I am sure it would come up easily in a Google search.

Is it this one?

http://pete-coleman.com/forum/

Definitely a useful resource in any case, as this site/forum deals specifically with the Heller 1/100 kit. The only downside is that the photos are missing from some of the older threads.

in addition to the books jtilley recommended (and a good list, too), I remember seeing a great web site. I did not bookmark the site but I am sure it would come up easily in a Google search.

I generally start out by recommending three.

1.  John McKay, Anatomy of the Ship:  The 100-Gun Ship Victory.  This is typical of the Conway Maritime Press's "Anatomy" series:  a set of incredibly detailed drawings accompanied by a brief text and a decent assortment of photos.  This particular one has drawn some fire from naval historians due to some gaffes in research - most of which aren't particularly relevant to the modeler working from the Heller kit.  But in terms of draftsmanship the drawings - especially the isometrics - are absolutely superb.  I consider myself unworthy to sharpen Mr. McKay's pencils.

2.  Allan McGowen and John McKay, H.M.S. Victory:  Construction, Career, and Restoration.  This is a big, coffee-table-type book, but a real mine of information about the history of the ship herself.  For this project Mr. McKay augmented his "Anatomy" drawings with a considerable number of new ones; the goofs of the earlier book are corrected, and the new drawings actually cover the rigging more thoroughly than the first set.  There are also more photographs, and a great deal of material about the ongoing restoration and preservation of her as a "museum ship."

3.  C. Nepean Longridge, The Anatomy of Nelson's Ships.  This is an old classic, dating from the early sixties.  (It's currently out of print, and used copies, unfortunately, are pretty expensive.  But it's worth tracking down - maybe in a library.)  The title notwithstanding, it's a detailed account of how Dr. Longridge built his famous 1/48-scale model, which is now in the Science Museum in London.  Much of the text on building the model will be only of curiosity value to anybody starting with a kit, but the biggest virtue of the book from the plastic modeler's standpoint is its verbal descriptions of the rigging.  Longridge describes the run of each line in his text.  The book also comes with a fine set of drawings by George Campbell, which undoubtedly would be regarded as the standard plans of the ship if Mr. McKay hadn't come along.  For builders of the Heller kit, this book is my first recommendation.

There are, of course, lots of posts about this kit here in the Forum.  A search on the term "Heller Victory" will provide several nights' worth of cures for insomnia.