Jake,
There's plenty of room for debate about those two
Cutty Sark kits. I don't have either of them in front of me, so I'll have to base this on memory.
Please note: the Imai one I'm referring to is the big one - about two feet long, on about 1/125 scale. It was issued in the late seventies; I bought mine on a trip to England. I have the impression that it was only in production for a short time - and Imai, of course, has since gone out of business. I subsequently sold mine, dammit; when I moved from Ohio to Virginia I had to get rid of lots of stuff. I wonder if the kit you're looking at is the little one with the one-piece hull that Monogram distributed for a while. That one obviously isn't in the same league.
Anyway, here are my recollections. Take them with a grain of salt; I haven't looked closely at either kit in a long time.
In favor of the Imai kit:
- Main deck molded in one piece. (The three pieces of the Revell deck are pretty awful.)
- Countersunk planking seams. (Revell's are raised lines.)
- Three-dimensional molding of some, at least, of the carvings. (If I remember right, the bow carvings are molded and the stern ones are decals. I may be wrong about that.)
- Better representation of the paneling on the deckhouses. (Imai molded the panels in relief. Revell just put raised lines around them.)
- Slightly better rendition of some deck fittings, such as the winches.
- Better rendition of the deadeyes and chainplates. (The Revell versions are pretty bad. They're way out of scale; those wide pinrails to accommodate the deadeyes are nothing like those of the real ship. I don't remember just how Imai handled that problem, but they did at least a little better.)
The Imai kit is not without its problems. The upper spars are a little heavy, and there are two funny goofs in the deck furniture. The kit is obviously based on the beautiful plans drawn by George Campbell, which show just about every conceivable detail of the ship - but not quite. He only showed the side and top views of the "booby hatch" just aft of the mainmast. Imai's designers, probably not having any idea what the real thing was supposed to look like, made it match the plans from the top and side - but it looks ridiculous from any other angle. And Campbell made one detail drawing do double duty for the two winches. The forward one is supposed to have a gadget called a "cable lifter" on each end - a heavy iron fitting that grabs onto the anchor cable, to haul in the slack more quickly (though with less force) than the windlass. (I guess the windlass was used to break the anchor loose from the bottom, and the winches to haul it in.) The after winch, of course, has no such fittings. Campbell did a drawing of one winch with a cable lifter on one end, and a note underneath reading "cable lifters on both ends of forward winch." The Imai designers apparently didn't read English. Each of the kit's winches has a cable lifter on one end.
In favor of the Revell kit:
- Bigger.
- Those wonderful crew figures and the figurehead. (Revell's "Nanny the Witch" is a better looking female than the one on the real ship.)
- Slightly more refined in some details (e.g., the railings around the forecastle deck).
- More accurate rendition of the trailboards. (Imai cast them integrally with the hull halves; the Revell ones are separate parts.)
- More individual parts for the top hamper. (Imai, if I remember, molded the studding sail booms integrally with the yards - not bad, but the Revell ones are separate pieces. On the other hand, Revell didn't make much of an effort to represent the studdingsail boom irons.)
If, heaven forbid, I were to tackle a model of the
Cutty Sark, I'd try to find an Imai kit. But if I couldn't find one I wouldn't hesitate to use the Revell one. It is, by any standards, a nice product and a sound basis for a good scale model.
I wish some of the Airfix kits were more widely available. I have pleasant memories of the
Endeavour, Prince, Sovereign of the Seas, and
Revenge. (On the other hand, the Airfix
Bounty is dreadful - one of the worst plastic sailing ship kits ever. It came out more than twenty years after the Revell one, but the Revell one beats it on almost all counts.) The ones I'd really like to see reappear, though, are the Revell
Golden Hind and
Mayflower. I don't know that I'd actually buy either of them, but they were terrific kits.