Building Heller Le Soleil

Thanks a lot Steve! You along with others were part of this build.Thanks for your help!

excellent build mark , I would be very proud if I were you .

Boy he was one cute dude, huh? Dig those legs! I have read things about the French royalty and you are right and they were the appitame of opulence. mmm!

Thanks to all of you for the kind words! I have a few in progress pictures but that's it.Ill put them on here as soon as I get a chance.

Tremendous work, Mark!

Sorry the photo-hosting gave you trouble....Photobucket upset a lot of people with their recent hijinks...I would have liked to see more pics of in-progress as you built it.

Finished, it looks terrific!  I'm very impressed that you were able to get good results from the vac-formed sails, AND the kit blocks and deadeyes...

And your painting is top-notch...all around, a beautiful model.

Congratulations!
Dave

Not everyone knows the meaning of the elaberate stern carving of the French warship,  LE SOLEIL ROYAL. The sculpture represents the ancient Greek sun god Apollo, decending from the clouds in his sun chariot.  This scene represents the French King, Louis XIV, who was known as the Sun King ( Le Roi Soleil).

King Louis XIV, who reigned from 1643 to 1715, a period of 72 years and 110 days, is the longest living monach in European history. His life reprents the extravenge and opulence in all of French culture and the arts. Hence the elaberate sculpture and art rendation in the design of the LE SOLEIL ROYAL, to the point where this extravence could render the stability and sailing quality of ship itself. All major European naval ships during the 17th century had artistic creations on their vessels, but France by far, out did them all in over embellishment of ship design.

Happy modeling    Crackers   

Wow! Great build!

Love the painting you've done - quite exceptional. I like what you did with the sails as well. The flags are flying in the correct direction (I see some models with real issues regarding wind direction, sails and flags ).

Very happy you were able to post the pictures.

This ship was the hardest thing I ever put together. I wasn't the only one who had a hand in this.It was most of you on this forum.From Jeff who got me the English instructions and a bunch of help along the way and has become a good friend to boot to Gmorrison who has gotten me spare parts for future builds and a lot of advice and help on how to put pictures on this forum(along with several others)theirs Don,Crackers,Steve,Gene, and so many others,I thankyou for all your help!Mark

This is in no attempt to minimize Mark Carroll's excellent model of the French, LE SOLEIL ROYAL. Quite the contrary. His post is a testiment to hard work and devotion to excellence. On Face book, Marco Pusch posted his version of this unusual warship without rigging.

I have no idea if this model is a kit, or more than likely, a scratch built attempt, which is an exampt to the quality of the ship modeler's art at its highest order.

Happy modeling     Crackers   

Wow! This wood version is quite exquisite !

Excellent! All the hard work and overcoming obstacles more than paid off. You’ve created something to be proud of. 

Excellent work, Mark. Glad you were able to download your picture for everyone on the Forum to admire.

Here is a different Time Line view of the LE SOLEIL ROYAL, as presented on Facebook, where the elegent stern is presented as the central focus. This is creative modeling at its best.

Happy modeling.   Crackers 

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Finally finished my Soleil Royal here's one picture,more to follow

If you use postimage.com, it is quite simple.

Upload your pictures. 

Click on any image of yours. 

The picture pops up with an icon above it that says "share"

Click on it, and another menu pops up; the second choice is "direct link"

Copy it and paste in this, or any other website.

sigh.....okay, let's try this:  I will deliberately leave out the  backslash in front of the SECOND "img":

[img]direct address of stored image[img]

this is in response to the people who had trouble posting pictures...."direct address of stored image" refers to the literal address of the image that was uploaded to an internet storage service....similar to the now ruined photobucket site...I am currently using Storedimages.org....

again, if I were to put the backslash in front of the second "img", then it would look for an image and post something unrecognizable....in the case of the image I posted, it was a stored address of the picture of the Heller Victory seen in the post....

BTW:  I finished the Victory, second time made, and I do have the Heller French ship also mentioned in this thread....

?

I run a fishing forum and the standard for posting pictures is to enclose the direct address ( from an online site where your photo has been uploaded ) between two image tags, which are brackets with image typed within them, the second one has a backslash in front of the word IMG.......

instead of using a real brackets ([ ]), I will used the "word" bracket, otherwise in my example, it will look for a photo:

bracket img bracket    direct address of photo  bracket backslash img bracket......

so as an example:

Crackers, you really put some great pictures on,  Thanks.

So, for all of you thinking about putting this ship together I have some good news and some bad news for you and if you have already put it together you are going to know exactly what I mean. This ship grabbed me right from the start with its vivid colors and ornate figures  and scroll work in bright gold. I have just finished putting on all of the standing rigging. I read everything I could about putting together this ship on the FSM forum and elsewhere. There wasn't much said about these horrible pieces of crap deadeyes they gave you with this ship,theirs no groove around them to hold the rigging in place! So get wooden deadeyes from HiSmodel with the chain plates they offer . The ratlines will look a whole lot better and go in so much quicker. I can't figure out for the life of me why Heller didn't put grooves around these horrible deadeyes and my Victory is waiting in line to be put together and those deadeyes are the exact same way. The jig they give you to thread them with the SR works great! The jig they give you for the ratlines is useless and uses a TREMENDOUS amount of thread, it's best to install the ratlines one at a time ON the ship and then tie or glue on the cross pieces. I don't  really care about the "hole" behind the figure head or that the decks don't protrude outward on the rear sides of the ship by the captain's quarters or that the masts are too tall and not exactly to scale or that theirs no way to attach the yard arms to the masts, what does bother me is how difficult they made  it to put together this ship with the parts supplied. Another thing that is the blocks they supply. For starters,it's next to impossible to rig a line around these blocks and keep the line from falling off. To keep from spending a lot of money on news blocks I tilted all the blocks  slightly forward on the sprues and sanded off all of the"protruding pegs" and took my dremel with a thin cutting wheel on it and put a groove  on both sides of every block-it's time consuming but it worked perfectly. I was able to tie a line around every block with almost no problems. Plus you can spray paint the blocks what ever color you want and I also drilled all the holes a little bit bigger. I bought cloth sails from HiSmodel and their beautiful, but decided I want to go a different way.I will sell these for $20.00 less than I paid for them if anyone is interested.Happy ship modeling!

Hey Steve,you replied to my post back in January about rigging and it helped.I have built maybe 10 ships in my day plastic and wood alike and most have had plastic or very simple ratlines to install. I am working on the Soleil Royal which is a massive undertaking. I am so frustrated with these pieces of crap deadeyes they provided with this ship- it is almost impossible to make these look good but I am so far into it (all lower and full foremast) that I don't want to tear it apart again and spend more money and hours of time.Have you had experience with these?Its only because of not knowing that I used these pieces of junk.I also have the Victory to put together that has the same thing on them.I am getting samples of HiSmodels deadeyes and chain plates have you ever used these? thanks for your input its much appreciated.

Mark

It looks like I won't be having any pictures on here any time soon! 

Well I have finally started on my SR and as other posts have said there are some problems with this kit but nothing that can't be fixed. First of all I dont like the water line, so with a curved blade I very carefully scraped it off both sides just down to the embossing and then with a small metal ruler I rescribed the plank lines both horizontal and vertical and with an xacto knife I rescribed some wood grain back in at different places and if your careful you cant even tell there was a line there. Another thing I dont like is the white hull ,so I decided to put a real wood grain on there. The best way to get a good wood grain look on plastic (or anything else for that matter) is to use artist oils. After masking the hull I sprayed it with Tamiya wood deck tan. After it was dry I mixed burnt umber with a product called Liquin liquid( not gel).You can get both these products at any art supply or Hobby Lobby. I applied it with a semi stiff brush along the entire hull  following the "grain "of the wood. If you don't mix artist oils with liquin liquid it will take FOREVER to dry. After 24 hrs it should be dry, if not, it will be the next day. Next I sprayed 2 coats of an acrylic clear flat to protect it.

Next I put together the stand that came with the kit. After about 4 hrs of gluing scraping and sanding out all the tons of seams I was ready to make this look like wood also.This stand does not have any embossing on it like the hull does so you have to "invent" some and the best way to do that is take a model razor saw with very small teeth and start dragging the saw blade along all the sufaces of the plastic. Its best to practice on a spare piece and after a while you can get pretty good at it by putting waves and adjacent angles on it and embossing your own wood grain in it. Now you can apply the same steps on finishing as the hull. By using different base colors and different colors of oils you can get several different wood grain patterns. I just got a complete rigging set,parrels,and sails from HiSmodel and they all look pretty good. I have also received and installed real wood decks from "Scale Decks" they look good also. I was somewhat disappointed that you can't stain them because then you cant see the deck boards.They have to remain as they are. Next post will be cannons and some painting along with masts and putting together parrels.I look forward to your comments!

Mark,

As others have said, you can't directly post images to FineScale from your comptuter. You need to have your images on a site in cyberspace ... either your own website or an image hosting site. Several of the image hosting sites have been mentioned in this thread as well as the forum for technical assistance in the Feedback, Testing section. See here:

http://cs.finescale.com/fsm/feedback_help_and_testing/f/22.aspx

Once you've actually uploaded the images you're interesting in posting to your thread in FineScale to whichever image hosting site you're using, then instructions on how to post from that site can be had from many of us as well as (and probably best from) the forum I've linked above.

Best of luck in that endevor.