Yes, You are right - i have in my collection Sirene boxed by “Minicraft”, with Minicraft’s instruction of assembly etc. I can write today later at home, which year is on the box. On the model kit’s hull both parts there are labels “Heller”. If You want, I can post pictures of this kit in beginning of next week - my camera “is travelling” together with my spouse at the moment :-).
There is’nt any year of produce on the Minicraft box or in the assembly instructions.
The Heller La Sirene was in a Heller box. I remember seeing at Polks Hobbies in NY City in mid 68. It was sold by Minicraft in the early 70s, with the same Heller box art. Aurora"Prestige Series" marketed it in the same Heller box from the late 70s to the early 80s.
This is the same model as the Phenix, the only difference being the large stern cabin on the poop deck and the mermaid figurehead.
The Phenix dated from 1664 and was unique in the fact that there was no raised forecastle deck. There is a picture of it in B Landstroms "The Ship" from the Atlas DColbert.
The Sirene is also from this timeline. Since she was the admiral`s flagship expains the ornate stern and large mermaid figurehead. The galleries at the bow are another unusual touch, but they do add character to the ship.The ship is typical of the baroque style of the era. This was a powerful ship for its time. It was as large as a British 3 decker and was better in battle because the lower gun deck was higher above the water than the British ships of the era. This meant that she could fire broadsides without the lower gun deck taking on water…
This is a great build.It is nowhere as difficult as some would have you believe. What does scare American builders is the Heller loom for making the shrouds and ratlines. Deal with it!
What really makes this model is the ornate stern and “Madeleine” -the mermaid figurehead. She looks good if you paint her upper body a flesh color and the lower part gold.The kit also comes with vac-form sails and flags.
I built it in the late 70s and still have itv in my bcollection. A beautiful ship no matter how you look at it. Definately worth your time and effort.
I can’t argue about the Phenix kit. It apparently was based on a reliable set of plans, and can reasonably be called a scale model - with allowances for the technical limitations that go along with its age.
The “Sirene” is another matter. We’ve established pretty firmly in other threads that no such ship ever existed - and I question whether it could have. The structure of the stern is ridiculously top-heavy; I’m not at all sure a real ship that looked like that would float. And imagine what that figurehead would actually look like, full-size. (For that matter - imagine the chunk of wood that it would have to have been carved from. A California redwood, maybe?) There’s just no way that kit qualifies as a scale model.
The big problem with Heller’s sailing ship line was always that the people responsible for designing the kits were superb artisans whose knowledge of the prototypes was less than thorough. The “carved” detail on the best Heller kits is superb; it can stand comparison with the carvings on all but the very best of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English “board room” models. (That’s the highest compliment I know how to pay to such things.) But in terms of historical accuracy, Heller sailing ship kits range from ok to hideous. We’ve gone over several of the worst offenders (the “Drakkar Oseberg” and the Soleil Royal, for instance) elsewhere in this Forum; there’s no point in bringing them up again. In general the company got better as the years went by, and by the late 1970s its products certainly deserved to be taken seriously as scale models. But almost all of them continued to suffer from irritating, if repairable, non-nautical characteristics. (The 1/100 Victory, which I, like many other modelers, regard as one of the finest plastic kits ever, offers no means of fastening the yards to the masts. And some of its belaying pins have sharp points, and its boats are undetailed, hollow shells. The 1/150 74-gun ships have flat decks, and the “wood grain” detail on their hulls imply that each of them was hacked bodily from a single tree. The big German steel barques, Pamir and Passat, have “jackstay eyebolts” on the fronts of their yards instead of the tops. And so forth.)
Another of my gripes with Heller is that it unwittingly perpetuated the myth of the Great Ratline Problem. Some of the jigs, looms, and other gadgets that the Heller engineers concocted are downright diabolical - and I have yet to see any evidence that they can be made to work effectively. We’ve discussed several times in this Forum a couple of ways to make ratlines look decent. On scales from 1/100 up, rigging ratlines to scale (i.e., with clove hitches) isn’t nearly as difficult as many people seem to think. On scales smaller than that, the old-fashioned “needle-through-the-shroud” trick, which modelers have been using for at least a hundred years, is virtually guaranteed to produce better-looking results than any of the jigs (or plastic-coated-thread, or injection-molded plastic abominations) that the kit manufacturers have inflicted on consumers. There’s no legitimate reason for the humble ratline to be the big stumbling block for modelers that it seems to be.
It’s reliably reported that, in the late seventies or early eighties, Heller had a number of ambitious, large-scale ship projects in the planning stages: H.M.S. Prince, the Mary Rose, the Henri Grace a Dieu, and several others that I’ve forgotten. If those kits had appeared - and if the company’s steady improvement in accuracy had continued - they probably would have changed the face of plastic sailing ship modeling. Unfortunately, at that point Heller was having serious financial problems, and all the sailing ship projects got shelved for good.
And now the plastic sailing ship is almost an extinct species. Revell’s last one, the beautiful little Viking ship, was originally released in 1977. (The company’s first sailing ship, the 1/192 Constitution, had appeared in 1956. Revell has now been out of the sailing ship business for considerably longer than it was in it.) Airfix hasn’t released a new sailing ship in at least 25 years; neither has Heller. One of the bright lights in the hobby, Imai, made a brief appearance on the scene in the seventies and eighties, and then went broke. There are faint signs of life from Zvezda and another Russian company whose name I’ve forgotten (the original source of the “new” French frigate “Acheron” - actually a reissue of a Portuguese warship whose name also slips my senile memory); maybe we’ll see something more from that direction. Otherwise, it seems, plastic sailing ship enthusiasts will have to make do with kits that are three, four, and five decades old.
Re the Heller Sirene. This ship actually existed. Go to Model Warships.com. Go to home page, then Gallery. Click on “small ships” then go to year 2008. Run the category until you see the model, made by Mario Grima. According to Mr. Grima, this ship took part in the batle of La Hogue in 1692, but was destroyed with some other French ships.
To criticize Heller and other makes is a moot point. Yes, their models do run hot and cold. This may be off, that might not be off, etc, etc, etc. What really matters here is the fact that these models actually do exist. Ship modelers-especially those of us who build sailing ships are considered “minority modelers”. The kit manufacturers know the market, thats why planes, armor and fantasy and science fiction subjects are so popular. It takes time to build a ship model right.
I think the last sailing ship model Airfix released was the Vasa., but this was in the early 70s. Since the ship does exist, Airfix was able to produce it by studying it in the Stockholm Museum where it now resides. I think it is an excellent kit , but when I built it, I eschewed the vac-form sails and made furled sails out of tissue paper. Wish I knew how to upload photos to this sight so you can see it.
Wooden ship models in kit form have been around since the early 1920s, but these were crude by anybodys standards. Some model kits of this ere did not even have roughly shaped hulls-you got a piece of balsa wood and you were on your own.
The hobby has come a long wa since then. Maybe what is out there is not perfect, but we, as modelers should not be put off by this. I find the most pleasurable aspect of the hobby is the enjoyment of building. When I build a model, I don’t care if it wins a prize or not. If people like my work, all the better. One of my clubs used to hav e a show at South St. Seaport in NYC. It was the first Saturday and Sunday in August.The part I enjoyed most was when visitors would ask me about my work and compliment my craftsmanship. They always wanted to take photos of my display and I would oblige them. This is what modeling is all about. Take care.
I
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There’s an old saying among academics that “the absence of proof is not the same as the proof of absence - and the proof of absence is difficult to establish.” I can’t prove that no French sailing warship named “La Sirene” ever existed.
I did, however, look up the Battle of La Hogue on several websites. (Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_at_La_Hogue_(1692) Later edit: for some reason the “copy” function on my computer has trouble with the parentheses in that web address. If you click on the link you’re liable to get a message from Wikipedia telling you that no such article exists, and asking you "did you mean Action at La Hogue (1692). Click on that and the article will come up). It’s pretty clear that no French ship of the line named “Sirene” was present at that action. And a few minutes’ surfing on “La Sirene (ship)” produced nothing. (Searching on “Sirene” did make me aware of some nice, unbelievably expensive restaurants, though.)
The baroque period in warship design was indeed characterized - especially in France - by extravagantly ornate decorative carvings. But another characteristic of the period was a concern for proportion and scale (in the aesthetic sense). Naval architects did not simply slap additional piles of decks onto the sterns of existing designs - as it certainly looks like the Heller people did when they designed that kit. And there’s just no way that a figurehead like that existed - or could have existed.
I’m certainly sympathetic to the view that, since the number of plastic sailing ship kits on the market is so small, modelers ought to be grateful for what they’ve got - and prepared to make the best of it. But that doesn’t excuse the manufacturers from producing kits that are…well, far inferior in terms of accuracy to the aircraft, car, armor, and modern warship kits they were making at the same time.
I’ll say again what I’ve said many times in this Forum. I don’t suggest that anybody refrain from buying or building a kit because I don’t like it. This is (for most of us) a hobby, and what matters most is what we enjoy. But I do take exception to manufacturers’ promoting as scale models kits that, by any reasonable definition, are no such thing. That’s deceptive advertising, and purchasers are entitled to know up front that what they’re buying is…well, something other than a scale model kit.
In other phases of plastic modeling, modelers routinely expect certain standards of accuracy. Revell’s notorious H.M.S. Beagle kit (which is in fact a modified version of the firm’s H.M.S. Bounty - which, in reality, resembled the Beagle only in having a hull, a deck, and three masts) is the equivalent of making a few modifications to a decent model of a B-17 and calling it a B-52. How would the model aircraft community react to such a stunt?
Don’t tar all wood ship model kits with the same brush. Some of them are junk - and that’s always been the case. When I was working my way through grad school in a hobby shop I used to tell customers, “most plastic sailing ship kits are junk, and most wood kits are worse - and more expensive.” And I’ve ranted at length in this forum about the products of the HECEPOB manufacturers. (That’s Hideously Expensive Continental European Plank-On-Bulkhead.) But there are dozens - maybe hundreds - of exceptions. Companies like ITC, Model Shipways, and Boucher (later renamed Bluejacket) were making fine scale ship models long before styrene came on the scene. And the modeler looking for state-of-the-art sailing ship kits today won’t find them in plastic (almost all the plastic sailing ship kits on the market are, after all, at least thirty years old), but in the catalogs of firms like Bluejacket and Calder/Jotika.
The Airfix Wasa is one of my favorite kits. Fortunately is wasn’t the last one from that stable. I don’t have a chronological listing of all Airfix’s kits. (The only such sources I have are Dr. Thomas Graham’s fine books on Revell and Monogram; the recently-published Boy’s Book of Airfix is on my wish list.) But I’m fairly certain that Airfix released at least four sailing ships after the Wasa: the St. Louis, Golden Hind, Mayflower, and H.M.S. Bounty. The first three of those are pretty good; the Mayflower makes an interesting comparison with the two excellent kits from Revell, which are based on a different set of reconstructed plans. The Bounty, unfortunately, is a bit of a dud, suffering from all sorts of silly inaccuracies (starting with the fact that the maindeck is mounted on a pronounced slope). The ancient Revell version is actually a good deal more accurate.
Airfix seems to have come back to life, with some quite adventurous projects (e.g., the 1/24 Mosquito and the 1/350 H.M.S. Illustrious). If that company were to get back into the sailing ship field nobody would be happier than I would. But I’m not holding my breath.
Very true about the Revell “Beagle”. It obviously was based on their HMS Bounty. I`ve got it in my collection, but it is not very high on my must build list.
Getting more than one model from a single kit is nothing new. It goes way back to the Marx Sea Witch when the Swordfish, released one year later was the identical model with a different cutwater , figurehead and display base.
Revell got three[!] models from the Cutty Sark. The Thermopylae and the Pedro Nunes, a Portugese training ship. They also got two models from the Alabama-that and the Union Sloop Kearsage. The Eagle was the same model as the Seadler, the Golden Hind was marketed as a Spanish Galleon and the Mayflower was marketed as an English Galleon from the battle of the Spanish Armada. Also, their large scale English Galleon became a Spanish Galleon with the addition of a few new parts.
Heller pulled the same stunt. They also got three models from the Corona Galleon-the Galion-an oared galleon of the year 1600 and the Stella Del Norte, a four masted galleon of the Spanish ArmadaThe Sirene and Phenix have been mentioned as well as the Royal Louis and the Gladiateur, late 18th century ships. Their Oseburg and Rhein Matilda viking ships share the same basic hull components, but are different on deck
There are probably more examples that escape me right now.
Maybe the Sirene is more “Hollywood” than history, but Heller has released it again. The advertising blurbs call it a ship from the year 1772 that was part of a French fleet that was based in Canada. Go figure.
We’ve discussed this phenomenon many times in this Forum. Here, for instance, is a link to a thread in which we listed (I think) all the Revell sailing ships in their various permutations: /forums/p/42281/444078.aspx#444078 . (I started that thread; some other members caught some omissions in my initial post, and I went back and corrected it.)
The “Beagle” scam gets my vote for the title of most obnoxious in the batch. It’s particularly galling to note that the alleged Beagle-Bounty connection infected the world of the HECEPOBS. Quite a few years later, the Italian firm Mamoli unleashed a “Beagle” on an unsuspecting world: http://www.modelexpo-online.com/product.asp?ITEMNO=MV20W . This just can’t be a coincidence. There’s no way two brains could conceive such a thing independently. The inescapable conclusion is that Mamoli’s “research” consisted of buying a Revell kit and taking measurements from it.
Maybe the most interesting story in there is that of the U.S.C.G.C. Eagle and “S.M.S. Seeadler.” The kit doesn’t come close to being a scale model of the real Seeadler - but it doesn’t accurately represent the Eagle either. In this case I’m pretty sure the error started out as an honest mistake. We’ve discussed that kit several times as well - most recently here: /forums/p/123717/1240430.aspx#1240430 .
By my count, Revell produced a total of twenty genuinely different sailing ship kits during the years 1956-1977. (Caveat: that figure doesn’t include several genuinely original kits from Revell Germany, such as the Alexander Humbolt, Pamir, and Batavia. My basic source is Dr. Graham’s book, which only covers the U.S. branch of the company - and stops its coverage in 1979.) The company managed to turn those twenty sets of molds into about thirty-five allegedly different products.
I couldn’t begin to make a similar list of Heller kits. That company, in terms of reusing its molds, was considerably more creative (or unethical, depending on one’s viewpoint) than Revell. I suspect the number of Heller sailing ship kits - or, more properly, the number of names attached to them - is close to a hundred. As I understand it, Heller got its start in the sailing ship world by selling old Aurora and Pyro ships - with completely fictitious French-sounding names, to make them more palatable to the French market.
And, of course, Pyro did some of the same sort of thing (in addition to stealing many of its designs in the first place). Even Imai, which in some respects deserves the label “best of them all,” recycled some of its kits. (Compare the Greek and Roman galleys - and the various little 1/350 sail training ships.) The only major manufacturer that hasn’t pulled such stunts (at least to my knowledge) is Airfix. Bless the people of Airfix. May they get back into the sailing ship game some day.
[Later edit: I think the first instance of a plastic ship model being reissued under a different name may have been the Revell U.S.S. New Jersey, in 1955. It was, of course, virtually identical to the company’s Missouri, which had first seen the light of day in 1953. (The dates are from Dr. Graham’s book.) The New Jersey kit was different in two respects: it had helicopters instead of catapults and seaplanes on its fantail, and the instructions showed a dazzle camoflage scheme rather than overall grey. (The color scheme was, in fact, the one the Missouri had worn on her trials; it was completely inaccurate for the New Jersey.) Dr. Graham’s appendix would, I guess, make it possible to figure out just how many times Revell recycled its modern warship molds, but I don’t have much inclination to do it.]
I’ve been troubled - and puzzled - for a long time about the different standard that seems to be applied to sailing ship kits by comparison with other phases of the plastic model business. Repackaging the Golden Hind as a “Spanish galleon” is roughly the equivalent of selling H.M.S. Cossack in the markings of a Japanese battleship. Or a Spitfire as a JU-88. Or, for that matter, a Chevrolet as a Mercedes. If a manufacturer of airplane, car, or modern warships tried such a scam, the modeling press would go berserk. But sailing ship modelers, it seems, are supposed to accept that such behavior is just part of the game. I repeat: I’m not trying to tell anybody what kits to buy or build. This is a hobby; to each his/her own. But I do think potential purchasers are entitled to know what’s going on.
Hi-I`m now building the Minicraft “Stella Del Norte” for a friend. The Old Heller kit of a galleon from 1600. To further confuse the subject, I have the Aurora Prestige Heller “Stella” and it is a fictional four masted galleon from the year 1450. THey really got their dates confused with this one. In 1450 ships were just beginning to appear with more than one mast. Obviously a late 16th century design, how could they have dropped the ball on the year? Even if this ship DID exist at this timeline, it would have been more than a hundred years ahead of its time.
The Minicraft Stella is a decent kit, but, like others, it is probably pure fiction. It appears to be too wide in proportion to its lenght, and the oars appear to be an afterthought. Another “more Hollywood than History” model, but it is kinda nice in its own right. It does resemble the Spanish galleon in the Errol Flynn classic movie “The Sea Hawk” from 1939.
Since this will be a display model, Im giving it a colorful paint job. Ive got some crosses left over from a forgotten ship model that Ill put on the sails, Im painting the oars white with red blades, and the stern castles and galleries white with red , green and gold trim. The upper works are a light blue color, the mid hull section tan and off white below the waterline.I wont even bother to use the loom. Ill just use some injection molded ratlines and shrouds from another model.
At best, this will be a representitive model from the time that Spain was a major Catholic power in Europe. It even has a cross with a Christ figure to grace the stern along with the three figures that support the lanterns. Since my friend knows next to nothing about the history and development of sailing ships, it really should please him. If I were building it for myself, it would be somewhat different.
Until next time…
r
Squadron mail order is now advertising the old Heller Sirene (for a ridiculous price - though I admit I’ve seen worse). Apparently Heller has risen from the ashes of bankruptcy and is in genuine production again.
Here’s the link to the ad: http://www.squadron.com/ItemDetails.asp?item=HR52907 .
One very interesting thing about that Squadron ad. It includes a copy of what I presume to be the box art. There’s also a button labeled “additional view.” Click on that button and you get a photograph of the model - which looks nothing like the box art. (Compare the stern ornamentation, the figureheads, and the overall sheer of the hull. In the painting, the sterncastle structure rises naturally out of the shape of the hull - and the figurehead is of such a size that it could have been carved from a real log.) It looks like the artist who painted the picture (in contrast to the people who designed the kit) knew what a seventeenth-century French warship actually looked like.
Equally interestingly, the verbal description of the (supposed) actual ship is different from what Heller’s said about it in the kit’s earlier incarnations. (The one in the Minicraft box that I bought thirty or forty years ago had a blurb on the side of the box relating some utter nonsense about the ship having been sunk in a West Indies hurricane. And the “ship” seems to have acquired a new “history” every time the kit’s been reissued.) This time the description is so generalized that it’s hard to argue with.
On the one hand, it’s good to see that somebody in the Heller stable has, it seems, learned what sailing ships look like. On the other, this new packaging appears to be even more deceptive than the old.
That Heller has come back to life is certainly good news. (The same “new release” page on the Squadron website announces the return of the big galley Reale, which is on my personal shortlist of “best sailing ship kits ever.”) But I continue to think that stunts of the “Sirene” type do no good for the hobby - and constitute consumer fraud.
Yeah, the Galley Reale is a magnificent model. Ive got one in my stash, but the fact of the matter is that it is a big model and I really have no room to display it. I picked up at a model show in Freeport, Long Island about two years ago. The seller wanted 75.00 for it. I had the money, but was a little hesitant to spend it. I went back about an hour later. Since it was almost closing time, he said "make me an offer". I showed him 40.00 and he said "deal". I also have the Heller Xebec. Got it for 15.00 at my model club. I built it, but I made the sails from a thin muslin cloth. Since I cant sew, I simply glued some thread to the outer areas of the sails and weathered them slightly with varnish. This is a “traveling” model that I usually take to shows. To make it easier to fit in the back seat of my Honda, I only installed the oars on the port side, and display the starboard oars in the rack on the quarter deck. For my money, this is an excellent model and conforms fairly well with pictures that Ive seen in the better ship books. It too is a big model, almost three and a half feet long. I also built the IMAI model of the xebec about 20 years ago. It is a nicely done model, but is easier to display cuz its about half the size of the Heller kit. Maybe someday Ill learn how to upload photos. Take care, always good to bear from a fellow ship builder.
Well, today’s Squadron update announces the resurrection of yet another Heller marketing scam: http://www.squadron.com/ItemDetails.asp?item=HR52703 .
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered this one in the flesh, but I recall reading some posts by our Forum friend Michelvrtg about it some years ago. I’m pretty sure it is in fact the old Revell Golden Hind - one of my favorite kits - decked out with nonsensical ornamentation and flags and given a new “scale” of 1/200. (I imagine Heller removed the beautiful little crew figures, which were on the same scale as the kit really was: 1/96. Or maybe not. Maybe the same customer who’s seduced by such packaging will accept that the human beings manning the…thing…were twelve feet tall.)
I’d like to believe that the people running Heller nowadays genuinely don’t know what utter hoaxes they’re perpetrating on the modeling public. Or do they simply assume that the people who buy sailing ship kits just don’t know what a scale model is?
If you’re going to recycle old Heller sailing ship kits, messieurs, how about some of the decent ones - the ones that have some claim to being scale models? How about the Gorch Fock, Pamir, Passat, Preussen, or - best of all - H.M.S. Victory?
Heller is showing the Passat on their homepage, which BTW isn’t very user-friendly and doesn’t seem to include an online catalogue, just an order form for one for L 7!
The various sites that have this piracy thing seem to indicate an OA length of about 16" to 18" and a height of 12". I’m sure that includes the bowsprit, as it’s a “finished model” dimension. That would make it’s dubious prototype 300 feet long with a masthead around 175’ above the waterline- quite a force to be reckoned with!
If it is the Revell Golden Hind it would not be the first time it’s been sold as a pirate ship.
I picked up a Revell pirate ghost ship when I was younger after already having built the Golden Hind.
It was the same model but in black with Glow in the dark paint and decals with an optional eagle head bow parts.
Last year I picked up the Heller (Revell) Golden Hind and it still had the crew but no rigging line.
E…
Squadron’s listing of Heller ship kits ( http://www.squadron.com/SearchResults.asp?offset=20&comflag=N ) in fact includes (at the moment) quite a few of the company’s better sailing ship offerings: the Passat, Preussen, Victory, the two eighteenth-century 74-gun ships, and the Reale. That’s actually quite a list of good kits; about the only decent Heller sailing ships that I can remember (beware my notorious memory) that aren’t included are the Gorch Fock and Amerigo Vespucci. The Squadron list also includes, of course, a number of the old kits that are…well, something other than scale models.
It’s been a long time since I’ve had a close-up look at any of those 1/150 latter-day German sailing merchantmen, but my recollection is that they’re basically sound kits. I think I bought the Pamir when it was new. I recall being quite favorably impressed with the parts - with two relatively small reservations.
One - the process of reducing an enormous ship like that to a plastic kit on such a small scale inevitably leads to some pretty big compromises with detail. (Example: the Jarvis brace winches. Those machines are characteristic features of ships like that, and Heller did about as good a job of representing them in styrene as was practicable. But they’re barely recognizable). Two - the Heller designers were notorious for their mistranslation of things they didn’t quite understand into plastic parts. In this case the big culprits, as I remember, are the “jackstay eyebolts” on the yards. The designers had the idea of representing those fittings as little oblong blocks, to which pieces of wire could be cemented to represent the jackstays themselves. Actually that’s not such a bad idea; jackstays always present a problem on small scales. But Heller put the “eyebolts” on the fronts of the yards, rather than the tops. (Actually, on a “modern” steel ship like that each yard probably ought to have two jackstays - one on top and one 45 degrees forward of it. The head of the sail is lashed to the latter; the former serves as the anchoring point for various pieces of rigging - and a handhold for the unfortunate souls who have to furl and loose the sail.) A model with its jackstays on the fronts of its yards would look pretty silly. But the basis for a serious scale model was certainly there.
It’s interesting that the “Sirene” appears twice in the Squadron list, at different prices. Apparently the differences are the inclusion of cement and paint - and, for some reason, a change in the background of the box art. I think (I’m not a hundred percent sure) the kit labeled Golden Hind is in fact the grand old Revell one. (Revell and Heller have had various sorts of relationships over the years; I remember seeing a Revell Flying Cloud in a Heller box once. I have no idea what sort of agreement may exist between the two companies now.)
I haven’t seen a straightforward explanation of what’s going on these days at Heller. My impression as of a few years ago was that the firm had sold out to Airfix and/or gone out of business completely. (Or that the British firm, Hornby, had taken over both companies. There were all sorts of stories, many of them, I suspect, originating with people who simply didn’t know what they were talking about.) Now Heller seems to be in production again. Does this mean the firm is under new management? If so, is it physically located in France? Or Britain? Or the U.S.? Is Hornby in fact part of the Heller picture? I guess it doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of the universe, but I can’t help being curious.
Bottom line: in the tiny world of plastic sailing ship kits we probably ought to be grateful any time a decent old kit reappears on the market. And my suggestion to anybody who wants any of those Heller ones is to grab them now; heaven only knows how long they’ll be conveniently available.
It just MIGHT be the old Heller galleon “Corona” repackaged as a “pirate ship” Ive seen the box art and it does kinda bear it out, but it also MIGHT be the Revell "Golden Hind". Anyway, the asking price was kinda high, even if it does contain a few vials of paint. And why cant it be shipped to the US? I won`t even try to guess.
The big Heller “Passat” and “Preussen” are good models, even if they got the jackstay locations wrong. I have a very old Graupner model of the “Passat”, a wooden kit from the early 60s. Nice model and the fittings are very well done. This is one ship that I always wanted to build. Not too sure of the scale, but the model seems a little bigger than the Heller version.
With the “Pirates of the Carribean” franchise -and the possibility of a “Pirates 4”, it seems that pirates are very cool right now. It isn`t too surprising to see the kitmakers trying to cash in on it, but at what price?
Lindberg even re released some of the old Pyro pistol-gun models from the 50s as "pirate pistols". Remember their first pirate ship models? The "Wappen Von Hamburg" as the Captain Kidd galleon and the French frigate "La Flore" as the "Jolly Rogers? These were good models and fairly authentic, especially when compared to the illustrations of them in B Landstroms great work “The Ship” I was able to build a fairly accurate version -if accurate can be used to describe a fictional ship- model of the “HMS Surprise” from the Jolly Rogers, but it did require some major surgery. Model was a hit at the Northeast Ship modelers convention and show in New London, CT a few years ago.
Ive got a few free weeks after the summer session of school ends in late July-Im a returned adult student going for a teaching degree, and I hope to do some serious model building then. I also got some infomation on how to post pictures . Maybe some day I`ll try it, or give you a link to the clubs website where you can see some of my work-and the work of others. Until that time…
Heller kits seem to be available in the UK again too, the flagship of the range,HMS Victory, retailing for around £120-30 (or roughly the price of two Revell 1/96 Connies!)
I too find info on the current status of Heller S.A. hard to come by. I even wonder whether we are looking at a genuine resurrection of the company or a re-box and sell-off of pre-2006 stock as part of the work of the administrators’ attempt to claw back some money? I haven’t had a chance to ask in my local hobby shop here in the UK, but I will do so the next time I’m in.
I wouldn’t care to speculate on it all really, but it would be interesting to know whether Heller is going to be here to stay or this is a last-ditch attempt to get rid of stock.
A couple of those big sailing ships are well worth building, but are pretty huge projects (I have the French 74s and Passat which I picked up very cheap in the late '90s), but I am rather aprehensive of buying a model as complicated as the big heller ships at full retail price unless there was imminent danger of them disappearing from the market and reverting to the prices charged by speculative vendors in the second-hand marketplace!
Will
I imagine the “cannot be shipped by air” notice has to do with the bottles of cement that are contained in the kits. (The kits that don’t have cement included don’t seem to carry the notice.) Whether Squadron actually has all these kits in its Texas warehouse, and can therefore ship them to addresses in the U.S. by UPS ground, I don’t know; my guess is the answer is yes. Squadron generally seems to be pretty good about identifying merchandise that’s out of stock.
In addition to the points Billyboy raised, another reason to worry about these kits is that Heller is well known to have had some pretty severe quality control problems in recent years. I haven’t built a Heller kit in a long time myself, but here in the Forum I’ve read lots of complaints about brittle, warped, and/or rubbery styrene that’s a far cry from what used to be the company’s standard. If what’s being sold now is in fact a batch of kits that were squirted out of the molds before the “old” Heller went bankrupt, and have been sitting in a warehouse somewhere ever since, heaven only knows what may be in those boxes.
I personally don’t intend to take the risk - at least until I can either see the product with my own eyes or read a review from knowledgeable modeler who’s looked at the “new product” in question. In the mean time, my own personal stash is such that it’s capable - quite literally - of lasting me the rest of my life.
I’m pretty sure that Heller is still based in France and is actually producing kits rather than selling off old stock for two reasons.
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There is a steady flow of Heller sailing ship kits into the UK - many of the stockists report healthy stock numbers which appear to be replenished from time to time
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I bought the Real de France in Feb 2010 and it had a couple of sprues missing (some sprues are x4 and my kit had only included them x2). The seller put me on to the importer who supplied me with missing sprues and we had a conversation about how the error had come about. We agreed that they had been mis-packed and he gave me the clear impression that this would have happened recently and he might feed back my experience to them to avoid future mistakes (a warning for all you modellers who buy and stash - check the contents before putting a kit into storage!!)
My understanding is that Heller is being run under a French version of administration - producing kits from existing molds and even bringing old molds back into production from time to time. Profits made go towards paying off creditors and keep a few people in work.
The chance of any new kits therefore seems somewhat remote but we can always hope some oldies they still have the molds of will make a comeback - my own personal wish along these lines is the Chebec mentioned a few posts ago - it looks like a superb kit and has a lot of positive comments on this forum - everytime I see one on e-bay I bid but my desire not to spend more than £100 ($150) before postage has resulted in failure thus far!
Hows about I start a thread to assess demand for the Chebec and feed back the results to Heller? I’m sure I could track down the phone number of that importer to get contact details?
RobertP,
I have been looking for a reasonably priced Heller Chebec as well.
Bill Morrison