Heller Sirene and Phenix

I guess I agree with scottrc: even the worst of the Heller kits look slightly more like real ships than most of those hideous objects sold by the European "plank-on-bulkhead" wood kit manufacturers. I've used up quite a few gigabytes, in this Forum and elsewhere, ranting about the garbage those companies produce - and the outrageous prices they ask for it.

I do feel obliged, though, to offer a couple of caveats. First - though I wouldn't be caught dead buying one of those Continental kits, I have seen some mighty nice models that have been built from them. The quality of the kits does vary quite a bit, and, of course, the skill and knowledge of the modeler have a great deal to do with the finished product. Second - there's one European company that does produce serious scale ship model kits in wood. It's called Calder Craft; its kits also carry the label Jotika. (I'm not quite sure what the relationship between those two names is. Maybe one is the manufacturer and the other the distributor.) I've never bought a Calder/Jotika kit, or even seen one in the flesh. (The big reason: money. The Calder H.M.S. Victory, on 1/72 scale, costs over $1,000.) But on the basis of photos and reviews in the magazines and on the web, it's obvious that these are high-quality products - and real scale models.

If people ask me for recommendations regarding wood ship kits, I have a stock answer. If you're interested in genuine scale models, stick with three companies: Model Shipways, Bluejacket, and Calder.

I've built both models and during the builds, and could never find any factual reditions of these two ships. The beams are too wide and the gunports are too low for them to be seaworthy. It seemed that the Heller designers couldn't make up their minds if they were making molds for a Galleon or a 1st rater.

By the time ships of the Sirene design, the high Trumblehome and Capolas were a thing of the past, so I too left them off. Both ships do build to look identical except for some ornimentation. I made my Sirene to be an Eastindiaman and sealed off the lower gunports. IMO, it still looks too fat.

However, they do build into very beautiful decorator models. I find that they do "look" like 17th century ships of the line from a distance and still represent ships from the historical standpoint far better than those wooden model kits from Europe.

The ship in my sig is the Pheonix.

Scott

I'm afraid both of these models are pretty thoroughly fictitious. I don't know whether a French warship named Phenix (or, for that matter, one named Sirene existed during the period in question, but the Heller renditions don't bear much resemblance to anything that ever floated. (As a matter of fact, I'm not convinced that a full-sized ship with the proportions of that "Sirene" model could have floated.)

In Heller's defense, both these kits date from the company's first years - and almost every model manufacturer gets better as it matures. (If I remember, the Sirene kit first appeared in the U.S. under the "Minicraft" label; for a while some of the Heller sailing ships were being sold in, of all things, Aurora boxes. This was back in the late sixties or early seventies. I feel old.) Heller sailing ship kits always had problems in terms of accuracy; the designers apparently were enormously talented artisans who didn't really know much about ships. But their more recent efforts are much, much better.