heller le glorieux 1/150

Beautiful ship Steve, I just happened on this site & see that you are back in rigged ships. That was a great job on the Robt. E Lee.  I miss a lot of the new posts as I forget to look on the Forum. I just mounted the finished Victory hull on it's oak base and am getting ready for the masts.

   I have really enjoyed the Victory & would love to do a slightly bigger version than 180, but not 100 like the hugh one Heller has.

thank's again prof . do I still call you that now you have retired . I don't I'm up to individual pin ***'s , but your first option might be better , the sanding has started , one side is nearly done" />

the other lovely little chore cannons , [they're kidding with that censorship ] .

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gene

I would love to see you do the victory 1/100 , thing's are a lot easier to handle at that scale !!

Love these Heller Kits Steve so will be watching with great interest.....Cheers mark

thank's mark you have to be an aussie with that emblem LOL

Certainly am Buddy. I am in Brizvegas so where abouts are you..??

200 k's due west , the other side of toowoomba .

Did you go to QMHE this Year.

where and when is that held ?

It will be held next Year at Redbank on August 26/27. Check out www.QMHE.com for more info.....Cheers Mark.

thank's mark ., will definately be there .

having a bit of a play with the boat's

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Steve, I lucked  into 2 big Heller kits the other night. I got the 1/200 La Gladiateur for $17.50 + ship, in a sealed box & the La Sirene for $29.99 + ship. The Sirene is due here this morning. I have never seen a larger Heller kit. By the way they were both listed a $100.

I hate to say it, but neither ship actually existed.  This was a common scam by Heller to make maximum profit off of one set of molds by simply repackaging and slightly altering kits of authentic ships as fictional ones. For example, there never was a French First Rate named Le Gladiateur, although Sirene was a common enough name for French warships. The trouble with the kit is that the figurehead is grossly out of proportion, and those forward towers on the sides of the bows were never a feature of French warships, at least that I can find. However, the models do make nice decorations.

Bill

Bill, I  had just heard that the Sirene was ficticious, but it is a pretty thing & will be fun to do the stern, more gold. I thought the other one Gladiateur was real or close to it. Oh well they are still pretty & I didn't pay too much. By the way how much was your Airfix St Louis ?

good for you gene , you have a knack for getting lucky , didn't know they weren't true ship's , pity that .

Gene,

I paid about $35.00 for it. The seller listed it as a "Buy It Now" item, and I happened to get very, very lucky by finding it right after it had been listed. I also bought the Airfix Royal Sovereign and Prince simultaneously from the same seller.  I sent those to John Tilley.  I kept the St. Louis.

As far as I know, Airfix was the only producer of plastic sailing ships that did not release kits of fictional ships.  The kit of the Le Gladiateur is based on that of the Royal Louis, an historic ship of 120 guns.

Bill

I'll go further than that. If I'm not mistaken (and granting an exception for the Bismarck/Tirpitz), Airfix has never released a ship kit under two names. Airfix's ship kits aren't exactly common, and they vary tremendously in quality - largely because they were originally released over several decades.

I'm a big fan of Airfix.

Is this model the same ROYAL LOUIS that the Heller kit LE GLADIATEUR is supposed to represent ? If so, the real ROYAL LOUIS is an actual ship, while the LE GLADIATEUR is an impostor substitute for a fictional vessel. I'd rather have the real thing.

Happy modeling   Crackers   

Cra ckers, That is a beautiful model & I see a lot of real nice rigging. More pictures would be nice. It is not an Airfix or Heller & it is wood isn't it?

coppered one side , haven't marked it yet with the nails . is there supposed to be a strip at the top of the coppering , ? I would also like to weather the copper with paint , is this possible .

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crackers

 

Is this model the same ROYAL LOUIS that the Heller kit LE GLADIATEUR is supposed to represent ? 

Well, yes and no, but mostly no. Heller has a perfectly decent model of Royal Louis in 1:200 scale (I think it is) like the one in the photo. Then they reused the hull, replaced the upperworks, and made something quite improbable that they market as Le Gladiateur. Basically it is the red-headed lovechild of a caricature of a 17 Century first-rate and a late 18th Century one. Not a happy combination at all.

Which reminds me that I really ought to build the Heller Royal Louis that I have got sitting in the stash. Those massive French first-rates really are good-looking subjects.

Staale is perfectly correct.  The Heller 1/200 Royal Louis is an excellent kit, whereas the Le Gladiateur is seemingly bastardized version made into a ship that never existed.  But, the model looks pretty and can be fun if the builder doesn't take it too seriously.  I wish that the manufacturers would take sailing ship modelers more seriously!

And, John, I will second your comments about Airfix!  I really wish that they would retool most of their ships, and model more sailing ships.  There is an excellent discussion on their website concerning this very topic.

Bill

I can't claim to have looked at every Heller sailing ship kit, but I've looked at a lot of them. In my opinion, from the standpoint of serious scale ship modeling, 10 of them are worth building: Le Superb, Le Glorieux, Pamir, Passat, Preussen, Gorch Fock, Royal Louis, La Reale, La Belle Poule, Le Pourqois Pas?, and the big Victory. Oh - and I guess the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria are ok, but pretty basic (and the Nina and Pinta share the same hull).

Note that Le Soleil Royal is not on my personal list. I've gotten into lots of arguments about that, but I just can't take it seriously as a scale model.

As I remember, Heller got into the sailing ship game back in the sixties. It started out by reissuing Pyro and Aurora kits under completely fictitious French names. Then it took the tack of picking subjects that looked pretty, and featured lots of "carved" detail. Heller's artisans were always among the best in the plastic kit industry. But they seem to have possessed a bare minimal understanding of how sailing ships are built.

In the very late seventies and early eighties something happened: Heller started making scale sailing ship models. Their kits continued to feature some stupid mistakes and omissions (did the Heller designers really think the Victory's yards weren't fastened to her masts?), but by most reasonable definitions the kits were scale models.

As I understand it, Heller had a lot of highly sophisticated sailing ships on the drawing board when, in the mid-eighties, the company went belly-up. It's interesting, and depressing, to think about sailing ship kits superior to the Heller Victory.

I suspect Imai might also be relatively clean on the issue.

Please note that David_K is building a masterpiece with his exemplary Le Soleil Royal. That kit can be built into a serious ship model given a dedicated eye towards detail, exquisite painting skills, and the investment of a small fortune in after market products.  Here's to building fine models from beef bones! 

Bill

I suggest we drop the subject of the Soleil Royal. If any subject has been beaten to death in this Forum, that's it. I thoroughly respect others' opinions.

I'm a big fan of the old Imai kits. To my knowledge the company only pulled one...shall we say, recycling stunt. The Imai Greek and Roman galleys used the same hull and many other parts. The hull was that of a bireme. To make the kits look different, Imai gave each of them only one row of oars - mounted in different places. To make either of them look reasonable you'd have to get hold of, or make, an additional set of oars.

Otherwise, they're nice kits. 

I really wish the Imai range would reappear. I've long thought the Imai 1/125 Cutty Sark was the best model of that kit on the market - plastic, wood, or otherwise. (But the Airfix one is nice - better in some ways than the big Revell one.)

I read that thread on the Airfix forum. The thing that worries me about it is that none of the Airfix staff has yet responded to it. That doesn't cause optimism.

The current Airfix ship line is pretty sad. At the present time, according to the company website, it consists of seven different kits. [Later edit: that number is wrong. I corrected it in my next post, below.] Four of them - the Victory, Wasa, Cutty Sark, and Golden Hind - are left from the glory days of Airfix sailing ships. Three more sailing ship kits - the Victory, Mary Rose, and Cutty Sark - are little tiny kits, pretty clearly aimed at the museum gift shop trade. Most of the warship kits from previous decades are gone. And that nice little 1/350 Mary Rose apparently is being discontinued - after only a few years on the market.

John,

Agreed.  I simply wanted to give a nod to Dave for his exquisite work.  Concerning the Mary Rose, I wish that Airfix had manfactured her in a larger scale.  I have that kit, and it is very simplistic. 1/144 would have been nice.

Bill

A correction to my last post. I don't know what part of the Airfix website I was looking at yesterday when I said there were only seven Airfix ship kits, but when I looked at it today the total was sixteen.

Two of those are duplicates: the Victory and Belfast in regular and "Gift Set" formats. Three are passenger vessels: the old 1/600 Mauretania and Queen Elizabeth and the 1/700 Titanic (which, as I understand it, is a reboxing of the Academy kit). The Belfast is the only survivor of the old 1/600 warship range. Then there are the 1/350 Illustrious and Type 42 frigate, and the 1/72 S-boat and Severn-class lifeboat.

The sailing ship range consists of the larger Victory, Wasa, Cutty Sark, and Golden Hind kits, and the tiny Victory, Cutty Sark, and Mary Rose.

The website used to have a page of submarines. Apparently they're all gone now.

Sad - but not quite as sad as I thought yesterday.

I'll keep following those Airfix Forum threads, in the hope of reading a response from somebody in company management. But I can't be optimistic at this point.

I've heard that Airfix didn't do well financially last year - despite some terrific new aircraft kits (and, of course, no ships whatsoever). It will be interesting to see what the website says about new releases for 2017.