Revell 1:83 Mayflower

GM,

Torpedo juice aside, while the original releases of these kits occured from the plant in Venice, CA, RoG has continued with many of these questionable kits.  By the way, I forgot to include the 1/96 USS Constitution (excellent kit) with its fictional sister kit USS United States. 

Now, I believe that I will go get a flask of that "torpedo juice"!

Bill

No, it's time for Friday afternoon in the ship forum.

Tripping that particular nannybot wire makes it official...

"Ration that man some Torpedo Juice!"

GM, that sounds like my kind of book.  BTW--last night I watched a program on the Smithsonian channel that was pretty good, Moby ***, Heart of a Whale.  Those were "interesting" times. If you get a chance to see the program, it was worth the watch.

Oh boy.. the naughty filter got me again.  I guess its time for some soap.

Well, that goes to show how little that I know about their history.  That is a pretty sad history indeed.

All of those crimes, and more, were perpetuated by the original Revell out here in Venice Beach.

It's funny, last night I was going through old books that were on the shelf when I was a little kid, and read.

The one, Adventures in Courage or something like that, had a chapter on Von Luckner that I must have read fifty times. It gives you insight into the factors that make you who you are. But I digress. The Count had an extremely wild and adventurous life prior to enlisting in the German Navy, at the age of 20. I mean, he'd done it all, even if half of it is true. Shipwrecks, near death, desert islands, beautiful native girls, fist fights and worse on docks all over the world. Quite a guy.

The chapter ends with "The Count and his beautiful wife Ingeborg are now happily living in retirement". (1928)

Made me miss Dad, reading his books.

Anyways, that Seeadler was a real travesty and truly angered me.

Bakster,

It doesn't surprise me at all that RoG would make such a blunder.  John and GM are correct in their assessments about the overall quality of the Revell Mayflower kits, but some of their sailing ship kits are quite scandalous.  For example, RoG has marketed a spurious modification of the excellent HMAV (Ne: HMS) Bounty into the (HMS) Beagle. Revell has also marketed their USCG Eagle as the SMS Seeadler (with minor modifications), their USS Kearsarge as CSS Alabama (with many modifications), and their excellent Cutty Sark as Thermopylae.  They have also marketed a horrible large-scale Spanis Galleon as an equally horrible "Elizabethan Galleon".  With the exception of the Galleon kits, it appears that the "parent kit" undergoes a great deal of research and is manufactured as an excellent kit, while Revell reboxes the kit as something else entirely. As the old adage goes, "Let the buyer beware."

Bill Morrison

I have to say I don't find that error in the kit's scale the least bit surprising. I think it's a simple case of not caring.

Revell Germany unquestionably has some good people working for it. The recent aircraft and modern warship kits testify to that. But I see no evidence that anybody in the company has any real understanding of sailing ships.

Some of the older kits have been reissued with spurious scales and descriptions, too. A few years ago Revell reissued its old, 1950s-vintage Treasury-class Coast Guard cutter, under the name Roger B. Taney. The Revell website solemnly informed the potential purchaser that the Taney was currently stationed with the Coast Guard's Eastern Sea Frontier. At the time the kit was reissued, the Taney had been decommissioned and on exhibit in Baltimore Harbor as a museum ship for more than twenty years.

We may hope that sometime in the future Revell - or at least Revell Germany - will start taking sailing ships seriously. In the mean time - buyer beware. It looks to me like the current management has no idea what's inside those shiny new boxes.

Thanks, GM.  I appreciate your input and encouragement...

JT, it is pretty amazing that Revell could make such a blunder. Maybe they thought it wouldn't be noticed? That was great work in how you nailed that down for me. Well done, sir!

There is a lot of great advice in what you wrote here.  I won't respond point by point but trust me, I am taking your advice to heart, and I will follow it as best as I can.

I just want to say that I am looking forward to doing the shrouds and ratlines. I fully intend to do them. If they become too problematic I will consider plan B, but I really want to do them. I will be pretty darn disappointed if I can't make that happen.

Progress has been slow again. This issue about rope diameters has set me back a bit but I think we have reached a consensus of how to move forward. I can now do some ordering. Some life struggles have taken some wind out of my sails too. Hopefully, more progress will be made within the next week.

Though it may not seem like it, I am really enjoying this build. My biggest enemy is having patience. The learning curve is a big velocity killer for me, and that gets frustrating. Add the shortage of time at the bench, amongst other things, it gets frustrating that progress is so slow. In my minds eye this ship is done! It just hasn't materialized yet. 

As always, I appreciate all the effort you put into helping. 

Steve

As John noted, if you skip the ratlines altogether, it's not a big deal here.

"If the model ceases to be fun, there's nothing wrong with changing your approach and leaving some things out."

That's the heart of the matter.

Yep, Bakster, you've got the small one. This isn't the first time Revell has botched up the scale of a model. (I sometimes wonder if the people running the company nowadays have any understanding whatever of the great skill those artisans back in the fifties and sixties put into those kits. If the Revell Santa Maria actually were on 1/96 scale, for instance, those exquisite little crewmen would be about four feet tall.)

The good news is that the parts breakdown and the detail on the two kits are identical. The bad news is that, all other things being equal, in the sailing ship arena the smaller the model the more difficult it is.

I don't give orders to fellow modelers, but if I were you I'd get three sizes of line in each of the two colors. (The cost difference between two and three sizes is negligible, and it's no harder to work with three than with two.)

I'm afraid the smallest diameter offered by Syren (.008") will look awkwardly big on a scale that small. If you rig the ratlines with that stuff, for instance, they'll look enormous. You need to find something smaller.

I don't recommend regular sewing thread. It generally has cotton in it, and cotton is notoriously hygroscopic - it stretches and shrinks with changes in the humidity. For the smallest sizes of rigging I personally like either silk thread or wire. Here's a source for very fine silk thread: http://www.jsflyfishing.com/fly-tying-thread .

Bluejacket also sells a very fine (.005") thread that handles nicely. It's cotton, but I suspect it would be a good ratline material:  http://www.bluejacketinc.com/fittings/fittings10.htm . I'm talking about the stuff listed as "New rigging thread." I wouldn't use it for long runs of line, but for ratlines it ought to be fine. If you do use cotton thread of any sort, it would be a good idea to run it over a cake of beeswax.

If you haven't rigged ratlines before, I'd suggest the "needle through the shroud" trick. Get the shrouds set up nice and tight. Cut a piece of stiff paper (index cards work great) to fit neatly between the channel and the underside of the top, and draw a series of lines on it to set the spacing of the ratlines. Then thread the smallest needle you can find with a piece of the finest thread you can find. If you're right-handed, you'll find it easier to start on the right side of the gang of shrouds. Shove the needle right through the shroud, then the next one, and so on. When you're done with one mast on ones side, put a tiny drop of white glue on the intersection of each ratline with the foremost and aftermost shroud. Let the glue dry (really dry), and snip off the excess thread with a razor blade or a really sharp X-acto blade.

You don't need to cross this bridge till you come to it - and you're weeks away from that point. If, when the time comes, the thought of all those ratlines is just too intimidating, don't be afraid to admit it. Consider leaving the ratlines off. If the shrouds are set up nicely, and if you've done a good job on the rest of the rigging, scarcely anybody will notice.

Both Revell Mayflowers are beautiful kits - among the best styrene sailing ships ever produced. The potential is there for an outstanding model. But don't get overwhelmed by the complexity of the rigging. If the model ceases to be fun, there's nothing wrong with changing your approach and leaving some things out.

Good luck.

Yes it does. Mind math says the scale of your model then is about 1/120.

I used to rig the 1/96 stuff with thin thread I stole from mom. It didn't look bad at all. Buy the two smallest sizes in each of the two colors.

JT--the length complete with the bowsprit and lanteen mizzen yard is "about" 14.5". It sounds to me to be the smaller of the two.

I just did a little math, and I'm confused. (That, of course, is my normal state.)

The Model Shipways Mayflower is on the scale of 5/32"=1'. That's 1/76.8. The Revell kit supposedly is on 1/83. Not a whole lot of difference. The rope sizes in Mr. Passaro's instructions (on the ModelExpo website) should be just a little big for the Revell kit.

But the MS model is listed as being 22" long. According to the Revell Germany website, the Revell model is 367mm long - which works out to less than 15".

The latter figure is about right for the smaller of the two old Revell releases. But that one is on a considerably smaller scale than 1/83.

One of two things is happening here. Either (a) the current Revell kit is the smaller of the two old ones, and Revell is wrong about the scale; or (b) the current Revell kit is the larger of the two old ones, and the dimensions on the website are wrong.

Bakster, could you tell us about what the overall lengthe of your kit (complete with bowsprit and lateen mizzen yard) is going to be? I thought we'd established that yours is a reissue of the bigger of the two old ones, but now I'm starting to wonder again. If it's the bigger one, you could just about use the rope sizes in the Model Shipways instructions. If you've got the smaller kit, those sizes would be noticeably too big.

Sadly, that one flew over my crows nest..  I am laughing now, though.

jtilley

Little is known about the way seventeenth-century English merchant ships operated, but it seems a safe bet that the captain would have been the decision maker about such things as rigging and other supplies. Miles Standish was a passenger - and the passengers probably would have had no say whatever in such things.

Little is known about the way seventeenth-century English merchant ships operated, but it seems a safe bet that the captain would have been the decision maker about such things as rigging and other supplies. Miles Standish was a passenger - and the passengers probably would have had no say whatever in such things.

Bakster, I have no idea what that spreadsheet may be, but it's a safe bet that it dates from no earlier than the eighteenth century (and therefore is just about irrelevant to a model of the Mayflower). My suggestion: read Mr. Pissaro's Model Shipways practicum, and study plenty of photos of the Mayflower II. (There are plenty of them on the web.) Don't get overly obsessed with such stuff as rope diameters. If you haven't rigged a sailing ship before, concentrate on doing a good, neat job of it. (And don't expect your first effort to be perfect.)

The notion of standing rigging being heavier than running rigging is generally true, but there are plenty of exceptions. (The "higher up, lighter rope" rule is better.) The jeers that hold up the lower yards (running rigging), for instance, probably would be heavier than the topmast stays (standing rigging). The size of the rope is determined by the job it has to do.

"But, in this case Standish would not have been sitting at a desk in the orlop, filling requisition orders for rope, as would be the case in a big warship."

That is an interesting point for discussion. I don't know the hierarchy and their responsibilities, but would that job fall on Standish?  Or would that fall on the Captain/co-owner, Christopher Jones?  I am just curious, and just for conversation sake.

Tried to post the spreadsheet, also as a zipped folder with no success. If anyone is interested in it, PM me with your e-mail address and I will send it to you as an attachement. That I know does work.

EJ

Yep, but don't overthink it.

Standing rigging is the thickest, except for anchor cables and gun rigging.

Running rigging gets thinner as you go up, because any of the braces, sheets etc, get longer and therefore heavier, and the loads they carry get smaller as the sails get smaller.

But, in this case Standish would not have been sitting at a desk in the orlop, filling requisition orders for rope, as would be the case in a big warship.

If it could be tied in a knot, use it.

I have a spreadsheet for rigging sizes. It is called "Rigging Rope Sizes V2.04". I can't seem to be able to paste it in the reply though. Don't know if it would help or not, but I found it interesting. Bases the rope diameters for various uses on the diameter of the main mast.

How do you put a spreadsheet in here?

Maybe JTilly could have input on this.

EJ

Thanks JT.  I will follow your advice on what to buy.  

Regarding what GM pointed out.  Since that I cannot trust the maker of this kit with their scale, I will have to just wing some things, and that will have to be good enough. I will be ok with that, I have to be. I do want to learn and make it as accurate as I can, but there is limit to what I can do based on my current knowledge. I am just too new to this. Maybe if I lived near the actual replica I could take pictures of all the ropes, and then by that way learn what is what. The instructions, any of them that I have found, do not give that clarity regarding rope sizes, and I do not expect you guys to handhold me through everything. I appreciate all that you guys have helped me with but on some things it seems that they will just have to be good enough. If in the end the ship looks cool, and it is a reasonable facsimile of the ship, I will be happy.

Thanks again!

Don't use the thread in the kit as any guide to anything.

There are a couple of golden rules. First - a decently rigged model should have several sizes of rope. I'd suggest at least four. Second - when in doubt, err on the small side. (But there's a big size difference between, say, the mainstay and the fore topsail braces.

I'd suggest Syren's dark brown for the standing rigging and light brown for the running rigging.

For ratlines you want the finest thread you can find.

I spent a few hours today researching the items that I need to purchase.  Such as deadeyes, chain, wire, and rope.  I could use some advice about the rope.  The kit comes with tan and brown string. From what I can tell, they are both the same diameter. I printed a size chart off of Syrens site and I matched the kit string up. They are either .012 or .018. I am leaning to them being .012. Are there any golden rules regarding the size of the rigging lines?

The kit didn't come with rope for the anchors, so I have picked out something for that as well.  Another thing that just occurred to me. Since I will be making the ratlines from scratch, I might have to look at another diameter for those. The plastic ratlines that came with the kit are huge in comparison to the supplied string, but I can't use the plastic ones as a guage anyway.  They seem woefully out of scale.

Any thoughts on any of this?

Ok that makes sense.  Thanks GM.

I would do the notch/ groove method, because a strop on a deadeye would have a loop on the bottom, which in turn will have some connection below it like a twist of wire which you can't force through a hole, but can hide in a groove.. Also it'll give you a little in-out adjustment.

Say JT-- I was leaning towards chains but your encouragement on that point pretty much cements it. 

Question.  You wrote: "I'd suggest filing a set of grooves in the edge of the channel to accommodate the deadeye strops. Then glue a strip of styrene to the edge of the channel, covering up the grooves."  I am curious as to why go that route as opposed to drilling holes in the channels for the stropes? Do you think it will be less problematic than drilling? 

Lastly, and regarding the backing links... Would it be safe to say that I could make them about the same length as the channel?  Maybe the same width? Sorry for the questions, trying to visualize them.

All this is very helpful. As always, it is appreciated. 

The Mayflower II has old-fashioned, genuine chains instead of more modern chain plates. I think there's a little room for argument about that point, but making them out of chain on a model wouldn't be difficult.

Places like Model Expo, Bluejacket, and A.J. Fisher sell miniature chain in lots of sizes. (I can't guess at the right size for this particular job - but err on the small side.) In photos of the real ship, it looks like the chains are hooked into the strops of the lower deadeyes, and the lower ends are stapled to small, rectangular iron plates on the hull. I'd suggest tying the top end of the chain around the deadeye with thread. Make the rectangular plates (later called backing links) out of sheet styrene. Drill a hole in each for the "staple." Then cut the chain to length (err on the short side; the stuff stretches). Then pass a piece of brass or copper wire through the last link of the chain shove it into the hole in the backing link, and apply a drop of CA glue. Should work fine - and shouldn't take long.

Trying to save the kit channels is a good idea; that way you won't have to fuss over the curvature of replacements. I'd suggest filing a set of grooves in the edge of the channel to accommodate the deadeye strops. Then glue a strip of styrene to the edge of the channel, covering up the grooves. I suspect the channels on the ship were built about that way.

PS:  I would remove the molded chain plates (Chains) as well.  I forgot to mention that.

11/30/15 Updated verbiage to (Chains)