Would you build Revell's 1/96th Cutty Sark if you had it?

Glad to help.  Those drawings are indeed spectacular.  The only ones I can think of that compare with them are the line of American clipper plans by Hornsby and Crothers, sold under the name "Seagull Models."  Those, too, are superb pieces of draftsmanship - but even they don't show quite the depth of detail and obvious enthusiasm that the Campbell Cutty Sark plans do.

I bought my copy of the Campbell plans more than 25 years ago; they're blueline prints, and they've faded quite a bit.  As I understand it, the ones being sold now are nice, sharp, black ink on sturdy white paper.  I really need to order a set for myself.

Another very useful source is Mr. Campbell's book, China Tea Clippers.  Most of it is available online, but the hardbound version contains quite a few pictures that aren't on the web version.

I'll have to read through all the info again but I think I have a good enough idea of what your talking about.

Now I just have to order the plans and get some reference pics and I'm good to go.

We should get enough people to do a group build. : )

mikepowers wrote:

I'll have to read through all the info again but I think I have a good enough idea of what your talking about. Now I just have to order the plans and get some reference pics and I'm good to go. We should get enough people to do a group build. : )

Sure Mike, I still have this kit too and could use a reason to build it (I'll just add it to the other three or four or five projects I have going on).  I have built both the Cuttysark and Thermopylea, and although they were never built to a fine degree of accuracy, they gave me a lot of confidence in building, and most important, rigging.  This kit is large, and pretty forgiving when learning how to set up and tension the running rigging.  You should be pleased with building it.

Scott

To help prevent the dreaded bent top-mast syndrome try and replace them with wood. There is a company here in Poland that produces wooden masts and yards for card models..I used them for the heller Victory and other smaller ships and they worked very well..

  They come in different sizes so can be adapted for most large scale kits with a bit of judicious sanding.

         I will try and dig up the web-site and post it for you..

 They also do a nice line in brass cannon with wood carriages..

       Not very authentic but they do look good left unpainted if your only after visual impact with all those brass cannons shining out..

The dreaded bent top-mast syndrome ?

I would have never known to prepare for that unless I was looking through these forums.

What a great tool for us modelers to have.

 

 

Mike,

On the Cutty Sark kit, the upper mast have never given me a problem.  The plastic is fine and strong.  I've built at least 14 of these in the past 20 years and have never had a problem.

Jake

Generally speaking I agree with Jake.  I do think, though, that the topic is worth a little discussion.

I'm a big booster of plastic sailing ship kits.  (That's probably a waste of time on my part, since the genre is just about dead, but I still think they have a great deal to recommend them.)  Styrene is a wonderful material for lots of purposes.  It also has some built-in limitations.

For one thing, the thickness of the "walls" of a hollow plastic casting are limited by the laws of physics.  If they're too thin, they won't support themselves.  If they're too thick, the styrene shrinks noticeably as it cools, resulting in the dreaded "sink marks" (among other things).  That's why the bulwarks of the Revell Cutty Sark are way too thick for 1/96 scale.  (Those bulwarks are made of sheet iron; in 1/96 scale they should, theoretically, be about the thickness of aluminum foil.)  The bulwarks of the Revell Constitution, on the other hand, are far too thin.  In the former case, the discrepancy is almost impossible to see, because the edges of the bulwark "plating" aren't visible.  If I were doing a Revell Constitution, I'd look into the possibility of cementing some plastic strip around the insides of the gunports, to beef up the bulwarks where the edges are visible.

The wonderful old Japanese company Imai just about conquered that particular problem by using an odd form of styrene that, somehow or other, allowed castings of considerably greater thickness than is possible with regular styrene.  Some of those Imai hull parts were really massive - and none that I ever saw suffered from shrinkage or sink marks.  We lost a lot when Imai went out of business.

Another feature of styrene is its flexibility, which, of course, increases as its thickness is reduced.  A styrene strip or rod less than 1/8" thick, or thereabouts, is extremely flexible.  That does indeed put some obvious limits on the material's usefulness in sailing ship models, since lots of spars - especially in smaller-scale models - have to be smaller than that if they're to be to scale.  (One feature of that excellent, 1/125 Imai Cutty Sark that I remember is that some of the upper spars were a little too thick.  Even the geniuses at Imai couldn't get around every limitation of the medium.)

Back in the olde dayes of the fifties and sixties, the good folks at Revell made a gallant effort to mold the masts and yards of their sailing ship kits as close to scale size as they could.  In the case of some of the smaller kits, that made the upper spars pretty brittle.  If you bought a Revell Flying Cloud, there was a fair chance that one or more of the skysail yards would be broken before you opened the box.  In the case of the big Cutty Sark, though, my recollection confirms Jake's observation.  That particular ship's top hamper was sturdy enough that it could be reproduced in styrene at 1/96 scale without a major problem of flexibility. 

One big caveat, though.  It seems that in recent years Revell has been using a considerably cheaper form of styrene than it used to.  The last Cutty Sark I started (and never finished) gave me a problem I'd never seen before - and haven't seen since.  I used masking tape on the waterline, and when I pulled the tape off a layer of styrene came with it.    The stuff had the consistency of mica.  That was a long time ago - and I have the impression that the situation has gotten worse.  Several folks here in the Forum have reported that the styrene in such kits as the reissued Kearsarge and Alabama is awful stuff - rubbery, riddled with flash, and frequently warped.  If somebody told me the spars in a recently-purchased Cutty Sark kit were two or three times as flexible as the ones I remember, I'd have no trouble believing it.

Before anybody starts buying wood to replace the spars of a plastic sailing ship kit, a couple of other points need to be born in mind.  In the first place, the choice of wood is crucial.  Some woods are stiffer than styrene; others aren't.  If you try to turn a piece of balsa or basswood down below 1/16" in diameter, it probably will fall apart before you're done. The dowels sold in American hardware stores and hobby shops these days seem to be made of one of two woods:  oak or birch.  Oak is far too coarse for most scale modeling purposes.  Birch is better (as long as the grain of the dowel is straight), but when it's reduced below 1/16" or thereabouts it gets just about as flexible as styrene.  Harder woods obviously don't bend as easily - but they do break, frequently at extremely awkward moments. 

The rigging of a sailing ship is designed to make any flexibility in the spars almost irrelevant - at least in theory.  In theory it shouldn't matter much whether a spar can bend or not; if the rigging is set up accurately, and uniformly tensioned, the spar won't bend.  That's in theory.  In practice, it's difficult to set up all the lines to the same tension - and if they aren't at the same tension, something starts to bend (or breaks).  If the spars are a bit more rigid than the typical plastic kit part, that makes the rigging somewhat easier by increasing the margin of error when it comes to tensioning the lines.  But wood spars don't come close to eliminating the problem.  Replacing styrene spars with wood ones certainly is not guarantee of success.

For what little it's worth, here are pictures of three models that take three different approaches to the problem: http://www.hmsvictoryscalemodels.be/johntilleygallery.htm

The Bounty is based  on the 1956 Revell kit.  I replaced all the styrene spars - not because they were styrene, but because their dimensions and shapes were inaccurate.  I made the replacements of a hardwood called degama (which I think is known in England as lancewood). It's quite hard and stiff, and extremely brittle.  (The fore topmast snapped when I was almost finished with the model; I was able to fix it with CA adhesive and a metal pin.) 

I also used degama for the spars of the Hancock.  It's scratch built, on 1/128 scale (3/32" = 1').  That model required some extremely small-diameter spars.  (Such things as the flagstaffs are well under 1/32" in diameter.)  In most cases it took me at least two attempts on the Unimat to get them down that small, and I broke more than one of them before the model was done.  (Incidentally, the hull planking, gun carriages, transom, and numerous other parts of that model are styrene.  It's a wonderful scratch building material, if its benefits and limitations are born in mind.)

The Phantom is based on the now-discontinued resin-hull kit from Model Shipways.  (MS currently sells a version based on the same plans with a pre-carved basswood hull.)  Having run out of degama (and having no idea where to buy more), I made this one's spars out of cherry.  It's nice stuff; I'll probably use it again.  It has a nice, tight grain, turns well, and is almost as stiff as degama without being as brittle.  Its biggest drawback, perhaps, is its color.  Cherry is notorious for turning darker as it gets older.  Within a few years I may well regret picking it.

If I were building a Revell Cutty Sark today I'd start by checking the consistency of the styrene.  If it was really rubbery, I'd probably replace the spars with wood (or maybe, in some cases, brass rod).  Otherwise, I'd keep the plastic spars.  There are, however, some other plastic parts that I definitely would replace.  Plastic belaying pins are no good.  (In most of the big Revell kits I've seen in the past fifteen or twenty years, a high percentage of the belaying pins have been busted off before the lid comes off the box.)  I'd regard the purchase of some aftermarket brass belaying pins as just about mandatory.  Same goes for plastic eyebolts; they can break too easily.  Several Forum members replace them with either aftermarket eyebolts or small cotter pins; I personally refuse to spend money on manufactured eyebolts, and bend my own from brass or copper wire.  (It takes less than a minute per eyebolt.) 

Styrene is great stuff, but it's not ideal for every component of a sailing ship model.  I suppose the ideal sailing ship kit might have a styrene hull, hardwood spars, and fittings made from a mixture of styrene, brass, and britannia metal.  Unfortunately it seems highly unlikely that we'll ever see such a product.

Well, this turned into a far longer post than I intended.  I apologize - and plead guilty to using this Forum as a treatment for insomnia.

The accessory parts you are looking for are at GPM.pl  These guys are producers of very sophisticated paaper models.

Jake, if you have built 14 without a problem then I should be ok. 14? What the heck??

Thats alot ah modeling.

Jtill, thanks for the info. Whew, I had to read it twice. :)

Its all going to come in handy when I built the CS.

The kit is mid 60's so I'm thinking the masts should be ok unless time has had an effect on the plastic and made it brittle.

I'm going to turn this thread into a document and keep it for the reference.

Thanks guys.

Mike

I had no idea she was still around. Thanks for the info.

I'll try to get some actual pics of her too, could'nt hurt.

 

Mike

jtilley wrote:

For what little it's worth, here are pictures of three models that take three different approaches to the problem: http://www.hmsvictoryscalemodels.be/johntilleygallery.htm

Beautiful work!   I was curious about the red painted gun muzzles on Bounty and Hanock    I can't recall ever reading anything about that.  Was it common practice?

Mikepowers - If you're looking for pictures of the Cutty Sark in her current state, a good place to start is the ship's website:  http://www.cuttysark.org.uk/index.cfm  .  Frankly I find the assortment of pictures on it a little disappointing in terms of numbers, but they're good, professional shots.  While you're on that web page, think about ordering those plans.  They're super.

Steves - Many thanks for your kind comments.  The practice of painting the muzzles of naval guns seems to have been common - though by no means universal - at least as far back as the late seventeenth century, and maybe before that.  Lots of the old English "Board Room" models have red muzzles, and they show up in contemporary paintings as well.  It's fairly likely, as a matter or fact, that the entire barrel was painted in many cases - especially if the gun was made of iron, and therefore subject to rust.  American Civil War enthusiasts tell me that guns in that conflict, both naval and land artillery, frequently were coated with a liquid containing tar and lampblack as a preservative and rust-preventer.  Lots of ironwork (anchors, chainplates, etc.) on board sailing warships got "tarred;" gun barrels, I suspect, often got the same treatment.

The favored color for gun muzzles seems to have been red - presumably the same color that was used on the insides of bulwarks, deck furniture, gun carriages, etc.  Recent research suggests that it probably wasn't as bright a red as I used on those two models, but rather a dull, flat red applied mainly to serve as a primer and weather-proofer.  (The old story about red paint being used to camoflage blood may have some truth to it, but it seems that was a secondary consideration.)  I've seen photos of one large, early-eighteenth-century Dutch model whose gun muzzles are painted white.  (So are the deadeyes, and various other fittings.  By non-Dutch standards it looks a little odd.) 

Sometimes the red paint seems to have been applied just to the face of the muzzle; sometimes the red went back as far as the first band around the barrel.  When I was working on my little Hancock model I spent quite a bit of time looking at the eighteenth-century British frigate models at the National Maritime Museum, in Greenwich.  I became convinced that there wasn't any consistent pattern in how the guns were painted at any given time.  Such trivia decisions presumably was left to individual officers.  Not much is known about the color details of American frigates from the Revolutionary War; I assumed that the Hancock probably followed British practice in that respect.  I painted her guns and the Bounty's differently, not because I have any firm evidence in either case but because, frankly, I thought it was a sort of interesting point and I was looking for ways to make the two models a little different.  In either case the modeler would be justified in putting the red paint on either the outer surface of the muzzle, the enire barrel as far back as the first band - or nowhere.

Jtilley-thanks for the information.   I now feel somewhat foolish having asked the question, as I was at the NMM this past year and certainly saw some of the models you mentioned.  Then, a quick look at Ship Models by Lavery and Stephens revealed several photos (one on the cover of the dust jacket no less) with red-painted gun muzzles.   I just never noticed.  Sometimes we look, but we don't see.