We can’t blame the people at Lindberg entirely for these hoaxes. They originated with Pyro. The first time I built the…well, the one with the stack and the paddlewheels was in about 1963 or 1964. It came in a Pyro box labeled “Civil War Blockade Runner.” I was in junior high school (as us Olde Phogies called middle school) at the time, and had just read a novel about blockade running. (Wish I could remember the title and author.) I remember being bewildered by the fact that the kit included some guns, which, according to the book, blockade runners didn’t carry.
I bought the two-masted schooner kit in about 1967, when Pyro was selling it in a box labeled “Independence War Schooner.” On the side of the box was some utter hogwash about how it had served in the Texas War of Independence. By this time I had a copy of the Model Shipways catalog; it was no trick to figure out that the kit was a ripoff of the MS Roger B. Taney.
Actually the story is a little more complicated. The Model Shipways kit (which Pyro copied) was based on a set of plans for the Morris class of revenue cutters. MS brought out the kit shortly before the appearance of Howard I. Chapelle’s History of the American Sailing Navy, in 1949. In that book Chapelle established that the Taney looked somewhat different than the other ships of the class. (He’d found a set of plans, specifically identified as hers, in the National Archives.) The MS and Pyro kits would be better identified as representing one of the other ships in the class - such as the Alexander Hamilton.
Model Shipways wasn’t the only wood kit company that Pirate Plastics ripped off. Another in that first batch of Pyro sailing ships was the fishing schooner Gertrude L. Thebaud, which Pyro pretty clearly pirated from the Marine Models Corporation wood kit. That one has bounced around with deceptive identities, too. By the late seventies Pyro was calling it “American [sic] Cup Defender.” (Yeah, right…complete with two stacks of fishing dories.) I believe Lindberg is selling it under that label today.
Almost all the sailing ship kits currently being sold in Lindberg boxes have false identities. I wonder if the current Lindberg management has any idea of what those kits were originally.
I agree with rcboater: for their time - the very earliest days of plastic ship model kits - those Pyro kits were nice products. They came out in the mid-fifties, when the only other plastic ship kits on the market were the very earliest Revell ones. They had their problems; the detail on them was mighty basic, and some of the moldings were crude by modern standards. The Thebaud’s instructions told the modeler to drill 1/16" holes in the one-piece hull for the eyebolts that took the bowsprit rigging. The Taney featured raised outlines of the closed gunports on the insides and outsides of the bulwarks - but the lines on the insides and outsides didn’t line up. On the other hand, I liked Pyro’s approach to the Great Shroud and Ratline Problem a little better than Revell’s. Pyro (lifting the idea from Model Shipways) provided “deadeye combo units,” each consisting of the upper and lower deadeyes, a passable representation of the lanyard between them, and the chainplate. The modeler was to glue this part to the hull and seize the shroud - made of genuine thread - around the upper deadeye. That was marginally more realistic, and certainly a great deal sturdier, than those gawdawful plastic-coated-thread “shrouds and ratlines” that came in Revell kits.
Somehow I don’t think Rockythegoat intended this thread to become such an exercise in Olde Phogey nostalgia. But this is interesting stuff. Long live those old Pyro kits - preferably under their original names. And may some plastic kit company see the light and give us some more Coast Guard/Revenue Cutter Service/Lighthouse Service kits.
