I've been following arnie60's and Force9's inspiring work on the old classic Revell 1/96 USS Constitution with great interest. I built the 1/196 version back in middle school or thereabouts, and didn't do an especially good job. I intended to redeem myself as a ship modeler by building the Thermopylae, but at some point over the years I tossed what was left of the incomplete kit in the trash. My life drifted a long way from modeling over the years, but after a series of recent life events I find myself in possession of a brand new current production version of the old classic. I work 60+ hours a week, and this will probably take me five years to complete, but who knows, I might actually produce something worth displaying.
At this point in the process, I haven't acquired any paints yet, so I'm busying myself with gluing together some of the parts that want to be cleaned up and painted as assembled units. Thus far, I've glued together all the cannon barrels, and have started separating some of the other parts into individual bags.
I am still deciding a great many questions at this point, inspired by the high bar set by Arnie and Evan. What will I do with the color scheme? What will I do with the transom? The coppering of the hull? How can I get a proper ship's wheel with 10 spokes, and make it look good? How am I going to deal with the upper masts?
The questions I've decided so far:
- I will use the deck from scaledecks.com instead of trying to make the three-part decks look decent. I've spoken with John, and am looking forward to making that particular purchase
- I will use scale rope instead of the embroidery floss supplied with the kit
- I will probably use blocks and deadeyes from Syren
- I am going to buy brass eye bolts instead of making my own out of bread ties, because I'm lazy, and having tried to help my wife with beading, I have advance knowledge that I'm miserably bad at forming tiny wire into loops
- I am going to rig the shrouds and ratlines by hand, and try to get mine to look 1/100th as good as Arnie's. I am inspired that he did such great work with shaky hands, and it gives me hope that I might manage to get in the ballpark in spite of having a fraction of the fine motor dexterity I enjoyed the last time I attempted any serious modeling
- I am going to use the plastic sails, and do the running rigging. I hope to achieve something like this guy on another site, but with less of an antiqued effect
- I won't rig the studding sails, and may go with the limited rig they used on the actual ship while sailing recently
- The belaying pins on this kit are mostly beyond salvaging, and I'm going to slice them off, drill out the holes, and replace them with brass pins as needed, in the fashion of the modern day ship. I noticed in the Google Streetview walkthrough they put up recently, that most of the rails have empty holes, and that seems like a nice detail to model, assuming the practice "back in the day" would have been the same
- I intend to rig the cannons on the spar deck properly, with all the tackle
- I don't plan to do any gross structural modifications to the hull as provided
- I do intend to replace the upper masts with something far stronger than this flimsy plastic, but as a woodturner who has made some tiny stuff on my lathe, I don't think there is any way I could ever make masts and spars thin enough to look right out of wood without them being nearly as fragile as the plastic, so I'm thinking about trying to use brass rod
- I will turn pedestals on my wood lathe, and make a base out of a nice piece of walnut instead of using the lame plastic version included with the kit, and I will probably rig a way to bolt it using the locations molded into the hull, and #8-32 machine screws, or thereabouts
There are many, many questions as yet undecided, but this is a start. I would probably be inclined to model the restored ship as she sits today, but that transom is a serious problem, because the molding details and spacing of the windows doesn't match the old Revell kit at all. The cannon port covers are another serious problem, because not a single piece of my research on the ship so far supports square, flip-up covers in any way, shape, or form. Even the painting on the box cover of the current release kit shows different doors, which happen to be of the same style as she sports in restored form today.
I definitely don't want to fill in all the little rectangular bits where the doors mount in the hull, but I'm starting to ponder on drilling holes in these single-part doors, then cutting them in half to model the split doors. I might go that way, and I might not. One of the reasons I got away from modeling, is that I tend to be some so obsessed with minutiae that I cripple myself by setting too high of a bar. I should probably just do the simple thing and go on, but if I could fix the transom and alter the doors, modeling the ship as she sits today would be a no-brainer. It's a lot easier to model something where you have tons of detailed reference photos, after all.
Well, that's my start. I decided to join this forum today after lurking for weeks, and throw this out there. With some luck, maybe I'll be posting pictures of something interesting before 2025. Here's hoping!