RobertP
Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4
One thing that did strike me was that all the Airfix kits have gone over to the Heller-style ratline “loom”. When I built them first 40+ years ago they had those “soft plastic on thread” jobs of the sort used in the 1:96 Revell Constitution. In those days Revell used the soft plastic ratlines on some kits but now seem to have gone over entirely to the rigid plastic parts which, on a small kits are probably the worst option of all. I assume the Airfix use of the “loom” is a hangover from their Heller-linked days?
I think I know the broad outlines of this odd "ratline story," though I'm foggy about some of the details - and dates.
In 1956 Revell issued its first sailing ship (not counting the tiny "Shipyard Miniatures" series, originally made by Gowland, that appeared briefly under the Revell name a few years earlier): the U.S.S. Constitution. (This is the one that's usually cited as being on either 1/192 or 1/196 scale; I haven't measured it.) According to the bible on the subject, Dr. Thomas Graham's Remembering Revell Model Kits, "the biggest headache [in designing the kit] proved to be the rope ladders - the ratlines - that ran from the deck to the tops of the masts. The easy way to make the ratlines would be simply to injection-molde them in plastic, but then the ropes would be far too thick for the scale of the ship. Requiring the ten-year-old builder to tie together true-to-scale ratlines was too much to ask for. After months of experimentation, [Chrarles] Gretz [Revell's chief engineer] and his engineers solved the problem by devising a machine that would feed plastic-coated string into a jig with all a ship's ratlines laid-out in order. The machine would then clamp down on the lines and heat seal them together. All the kit builder had to do was to lay the ratline assembly over a paper pattern included with the instructions and trim off the excess string. It wasn't a perfect solution...but it was the best solution any hobby company had come up with to that time - or since."
I'm fairly certain that all of Revell's sailing ship kits were originally issued with those "pre-formed ratlines." (An exception may have been the "Peter Pan Pirate Ship," which I think may have had injection-molded shrouds and ratlines from the beginning; I'm not sure. And I don't think the Santa Maria originally had ratlines at all. There's a strong possibility that the real ship didn't.) That included the big, 3-foot kits: the Cuty Sark, Kearsarge, Constitution, and their various clones.
Sometime in, I think, the early 1970s, somebody at Revell decided, for one reason or another, to dump the plastic-coated thread idea. I don't know why. Maybe somebody came to the same conclusion I did: that the plastic-coated thread concoctions just didn't look like the real thing, and were almost impssible to set up properly anyway. At any rate, Revell started packaging grossly oversized injection-molded "shrouds and ratlines" with most of its ship kits. (Dr. Graham mentions the dates when several of the old kits got their new shroud/ratline assemblies; the deed seems to have been done in about 1972 and 1973.) The big 3-foot kits, however, kept their plastic-coated thread ones. (I have the impression that the one 3-footer still on the market, the Constitution, still has them.)
The best source on Airfix kits that I've found is Arthur Ward's The Boy's Book of Airfix, published in 2009. Mr. Ward's "kit list" isn't as detailed as Dr. Graham's, but it makes it pretty clear that the first good-sized Airfix sailing ships were the Endeavour and the Royal Sovereign (aka Sovereign of the Seas), originally released in 1963. (Airfix, like Revell, had sold a series of tiny little sailing ships in the fifties, but these two were the first that amounted to serious scale sailing ship models.) I bought both of them shortly thereafter (though I don't remember the exact year). Both had plastic-coated thread "shrouds and ratlines," just like the Revell kits.
There's one questionable element in this part of the story. I don't think the Airfix Endeavour that I bought was the first issue of the kit. I've seen photos and copies of instruction sheets that seem to say that it originally had "furled sails," injection-molded integrally with the yards. I bought several of the kits over the years; all of them had bare yards and vac-formed sails. If the vac-formed sails were a later addition - well, maybe the plastic-coated thread "shrouds and ratlines" were too. I don't know. Maybe a British Forum member can shed some light on this.
Anyway, I'm pretty certain that all the othe "Airfix Classic" sailing ship kits were originally issued with plastic-coated thread "shrouds and ratlines."
I got acquainted with Heller sailing ship kits for the first time in the mid-seventies, when they started showing up in the U.S. under the "Minicraft" label. Some of the first ones I saw included that gold-colored plastic "loom" for rigging shrouds and ratlines, but I'm not sure just when it was introduced.
I suspect RobertP is right: the "loom" started getting packaged with Airfix kits as a result of the relationship between Airfix and Heller.
In the grand scheme of the universe, all this surely qualifies as honest-to-goodness super-trivia. But for Olde Phogies like me it's interesting stuff.