Anyboby built these kits yet? Is the detail decent and do they have any major pitfalls?
Jake
Hello Jake,
They can be classified as fair. Wood grain detail is thick, as usual with those old heller kits but they are proportionate. Yet I can say that personally I find all existing Santa Maria models somehow ugly with their shape like a dutch klompen [:)] I’d wish someone would produce the Santa Maria as recreated by Spain for 1893 Columbian exposition in Chicago; with the triangular forecastle and the stern with windows and minimal but elegant decoration.
If you want a goof large scale caravel replica, I strongly suggest ex-oriental replicas, new zvezda 1/100 Portuguese caravel. This is a genuinely new tooling model with superb detail and accuracy. It’s built in the same manner with the Revell 1/100 San Gabriel, the finest model of a 16th century ship I think. I’t’s really worth the money and surely far superior to Heller kits.
I have the three kits, havn’t built them yet but really looking forward to it! I had a look in the boxes and thought they looked quite decent. What I wondered, though, was what they are based on? I know that there are three replica ships built in Spain and wondered if the models are a copy of the full scale replicas?
I bought the Nina and Pinta, and built the latter, quite a long time ago - when Heller ship kits were being sold for the first time in the U.S., under the Minicraft label (the mid- to late sixties, I think). I think the terms “fair” and “quite decent” are pretty accurate. These kits obviously can’t be expected to come up to modern standards. The “wood grain” detail is indeed pretty coarse; Heller in those early days wasn’t trying to reproduce actual wood grain (with knots, etc.), but simply making scratches in the molds to keep the parts from looking smooth. I remember being pretty happy with the Pinta I built - after I dressed it up a bit with aftermarket deadeyes, crew figures, etc.
The Nina and Pinta kits use the same hull, with different upper bulwark components to make the finished models look different from each other. Since we know so little about the real ships, either one of the Heller kits, considered individually, looks pretty believable. I’m not sure, though, that I’d be comfortable displaying the two of them side-by-side, thereby making the identical hulls obvious. We don’t know much about Columbus’s ships, but it’s a safe assumption that two of them didn’t have identical hull lines.
I haven’t built or bought the Heller Santa Maria kit, but I’ve looked at it - though not recently. My general impression is that it’s on about the same standard as the other two. I built the grand old Revell Santa Maria (vintage 1957) when it was brand new - and several times later. My impression is that the Heller kit isn’t significantly better - or worse - than the Revell version.
Incidentally, Heller re-used that Santa Maria hull several times as the basis of other kits, each of them more ridiculous looking than the last. Heller, of course, was notorious for such stunts.
Hi: If you are interested in I have uploaded some images of the Heller its “Nina”.
Do not get distracted by the sails of the viking ships. It is simply decoaration and I am still not sure whether I will mount the sails (they are not stained yet):
http://de.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/kater_katze_felix/album?.dir=/dbf4re2
Regards,
Kater Felix
As an addendum: I used Model Master “leather” for my hull paintings. Heller will want you to paint the hull “cholocate brown”.
Regards,
Kater Katze Felix