I bought this kit from Model Expo a year ago when it was on sale for like $70.00. It’s a big kit 39" long. Has anyone tackled this puppy. It looks like she could be a tricky model with rigging particularly.
I built this same kit as a teenager - it’s been around forever. I remember that the fit was really pretty good - I even managed to make it look half good with my tube glue and brush paints. I remember simulating the green mold on the canvas sails with every dilute green paint. When I compared them with picutres of actual moldy sails, they really didn’t look bad. My first experience with weathering. I started to install the rigging and after a couple of weeks there was enough in place to satisfy my teenage artistic values. I probably put on about 30% of the rigging. I think my parents threw the whole works away when I went to college.
I bought a new example of this kit for a song a few years ago, mainly for nostalgia’s sake. I opened the box - wow! I remember that the kit had a zillion pieces and that the instructions were confusing, but it’s even a lot more so than I remembered.
I plan to start it whenever I happen to have a spare year or so.
I too am curious about anyone else’s building impressions. I actually DO plan to build it someday…
Big Boater,
email me direct at jbgroby@cox.net and I’ll send you some pictures of the HMS Vic’s I’ve done for clients. To date I’ve built 3. I mean it’s onlt 2100 parts right?
Jake Groby
I want to do an absolute premium job on this, so anybody that has some building tips I’m all ears…Thanx
You might want to check out the Seaways Ships in Scale email list-- lots of great sailing ship builders there. Many people consider the Heller kit to be the best plastic sailigng ship out here, but at 2100 parts, it is not a weekend project!
As I recall, there are two issues with the kit-- one, there’s no camber in the decks. (I think most folks just ignore it.) Two, I seem to recall discussions about an entry port that is on the model and not on the ship in Portsmouth, or vice versa…
-Bill
I haven’t built the kit and don’t have one in my possession any more, but I did get one sent to me for review by a magazine, Model Shipwright, when the kit was originally released (that’s quite a while ago). The following comments are based on looking up that review.
The kit does have deck camber. In fact I commented in my review that “with this kit Heller has at last discovered deck camber, and has provided a series of deck beams to make sure the camber is correct.” The only problem involving camber concerns the skylight on the poop deck - which should have camber and doesn’t. That’s a particularly vexing difficulty because the skylight is molded in clear plastic.
The question of the entry ports is an interesting one for which I don’t have a definitive answer. The ship now has ornate entry ports in both sides; every visitor is bound to remember them. The Heller kit doesn’t have them.
The entry ports appear on every set of plans I’ve seen - including the ones by George Campbell and Basil Lavis, those in R.W. Bugler’s H.M.S. Victory, and the most recent version, the superb set of drawings by John McKay in his Anatomy of the Ship: The 100-gun Ship Victory. But there’s evidence to support Heller. Another recent book, H.M.S. Victory: Construction, Restoration, and Repair (I may have garbled the title a little), by John McKay and Alec McGowan, contains reproductions of several contemporary (i.e., eighteenth- and ninteenth-century) paintings of the ship. Not a single one of them shows the entry ports. That includes the enormous oil painting by J.M.W. Turner, which was commissioned by the Prince Regent and is a major attraction at the National Maritime Museum. Turner is known to have gone on board the ship and made scketches for the painting. (On the other hand, he didn’t finish the painting till 1822 - and it’s of course quite possible that the ship was modified during the interim.) Heller seems to have followed the Turner painting. I’m not prepared to say the kit’s treatment of the entry ports is incorrect.
One area in which I think it probably - but not necessarily - is wrong is in the height of the forecastle bulwarks. Those in the kit are about knee-high, as are the ones on the actual ship today. Dr. R.C. Anderson, who was involved in the *Victory’*s restoration during the 1920s, said in print that he thought that was a mistake - for which he took the blame. Bugler, who was doing research on the ship’s history at the same time the restoration was taking place, concluded that during her 1802 refit the bulwarks were raised to shoulder height. The restoration committee found that out after the carpenters had finished the low bulwarks, which the committee understandably didn’t want to scrap at that point.
At the moment some extremely high-powered research into the *Victory’*s 1805 configuration is taking place, as the ship is prepared for the celebrations commemorating the bicentennial of the battle this coming October. As I understand it, the researchers aren’t convinced one way or the other about the forecastle bulwarks. They’ve raised some interesting questions about the decorations on the transom; apparently there’s some doubt as to whether the Prince of Wales’s feathers were installed before or after the battle. I suspect this project will reveal some extremely interesting and surprising details. But so far, at least in the materials I happen to have encountered, the researchers have said nothing one way or the other about the entry ports.
In general, I share the widely-held view that this is one of the best sailing ship kits the plastic industry has ever produced. It does have some problems, though. The steering wheels are crude for the scale, and somebody on Heller’s design staff apparently thought belaying pins had sharp points. There’s virtually no detail inside the ship’s boats. In my opinion the elaborate mechanisms and jigs for rigging the deadeyes, lanyards, shrouds, and ratlines are a waste of plastic - and effort. And some parts of such a ship just can’t be reproduced well in injection-molded plastic. (Those hammock netting stanchions have got to go, as do the blocks and deadeyes. A rigid mold can’t produce a block or deadeye with a groove around it and holes through it.) Even sillier is the absence of parrals for the yards. The kit provides no means of attaching the yards to the masts. (Apparently they’re just supposed to hang there.) The vacuum-formed “sails” need to be consigned to the garbage before the kit leaves the hobby shop. There is, as I recall, a little bit of awkwardness in the shape of the hull under the counter (fairly easy to fix). And the one I had, at least, was molded in an assortment of colors that made no sense. (A bright red rudder?) But a competent modeler could fix all those things.
One small point that a lot of people seem to miss. The yellow-ochre stripes on the *Victory’*s sides have a complex and subtle shape. They don’t exactly follow the lines of the gunports or the decks; they taper gradually at both ends. Heller, to its credit, molded a series of extremely fine raised lines that accurately indicate where the yellow and black should meet. I’ve seen quite a few pictures of models whose builders ignored those lines, with damaging results to the appearance of the finished products.
I’d offer one other suggestion. Unless Heller has revised it, the instruction manual is a disaster. The English version is downright scandalous; it seems to have been “translated” by somebody who neither understood French nor had attempted to build the model. (“Le mat de misaine” is not the mizzen mast. It’s the foremast. The mizzen mast is “le mat d’artimon.”) In the original French version the designers insisted on trying to describe the rigging (which, I suspect, they didn’t really understand) with a series of incredibly complex diagrams keyed to numbers that make the whole thing about twice as complicated as it needs to be. Anybody investing time and money in this kit should spend a little more and buy either the McKay or McKay/McGowan book mentioned above - or C. Nepean Longridge’s The Anatomy of Nelson’s Ships. Any of those works will provide a good, understandable description of the ship’s rigging - along with much else.
Hope this helps a little. It’s a great kit - but definitely not a weekend project.
Big Boater,
There is a Yahoo Group that deals just with modeling the HMS Victory.
http://groups.yahoo.com/search?query=hmsvictorymodeling
There are a number of people with really good experience in this group.
-Dave
When it comes to painting the decks, I’ve got a little trick I’ve used for years. I’ve always loved red mahogany, so that’s the color of my decks. Constitution, Kearsarge, Mayflower, Cutty Sark, Thermopoly, all of them.
And, for all you purists. The wood model guys get to pick what kind of wood they make their models out of, and that’s the deck color. Why shouldn’t palstic modelers have the same choice?
I use “Wood Finish” by MINWAX, number 225 Red Mahogany. I see no reason why any other color wouldn’t work as well. Oak, Maple, whatever.
If it’s a white plastic deck, you’re home free. Just get a small paint brush, like a sash brush (I guess, for us, that’d be a large brush). Paint along the grain of the wood, fore to aft, in long smooth strokes. Practice on a sheet of white plastic, first. Getting it right can be tricky at first.
If the deck isn’t white it’s a bit harder. You’ll have to spray it flat white, at least enough to hide the original color, but not enough to hide the grain detail. Let it set up for two or three days, at least. A week would be best. This stuff is an excellant solvent on testor’s spray paint. It won’t remove it, it’ll mix with it. And you’ll never get the mess off.
When you paint it, put it on in long smooth strokes, DO NOT try to touch up spots you miss, or, overlap strokes. Let it set up for a couple of days, then fill in missed places. Same rule, one stroke and stop! To do this right, may take a week or more, but I like the results.
If you’d like to see how it works, email me, and I 'll send a couple of PIC of my Victory’s deck. Put “HMS Victory” in the subject line so I know it’s not spam.
Mike K.
Thanx all for the info. I’m going to do a google search for reference material. Also I think I might build a table for building this on, it will probably take months to build taking my time to do it right, and still be able to do my smaller kits.
HMS Victory has a home page with lots of info look it up on google. I spent over 2 years build it, the rigging ooooh !! But I finally got my eyes uncrossed
Amen to your thread. One thing I say about shipmodeling, especially period shipmodeling, is that there is no limit to how far we can think out of a box.
Scott
LOL…The rigging is wherer I’ll probably be taking most of time on…My dad built this kit already and made a lot of timesaver notes…
I have not built this kit yet by heller, but I’ve done a few others of theirs and they all went together realy nice. Very few fit problems. The rigging was not realy done well in the directions so have a good reference handy. good luck and send us pics. when you get to that point.
Will do, and thanx to all those that have posted. I’m building my table for this project right now…
I am half way through building this kit. It’s finished up to the main deck. I detailed the lower and middle decks with rudimentary deck hatches, ladders, anchor cables, capstans, stove rudder tiller tackle. Those things would be visible thought the stern windows.
I have encountered several problems with the kit:
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The kit provided 60 32 pdrs guns for both middle and lower decks. In reality, Victory had 30 32 pdrs for the lower deck, and 30 24 pdr guns for the middle deck.
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The kit provided too few long 12 pdr guns and too many short 12 pdr guns. In reality, Victory should have 32 long 12 pdr guns, 30 on the upper deck, and 2 on the for’cstle, and 12 short 12 pdr guns, all on the quarter decks.
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The well known problem with middle deck entry port. Te kit had none, most sources say the real Victory carried one on each side during Trafalgar.
When I built my Victory for a friend, I went the way of making it a multi-media kit.
I bought a lot of real wood fittings, barrels, rigging line, sails, blockeyes, and strip wood.
Basically, I replaced a many plastic parts as I could with wood parts like the spars, stairs, etc. to achieve a more “wood” look. I used thin wood strips to plank the plastic decks to add a little more wood model feel to it. The sails I ordered were very nearly the right size for this size model and looked a hundred times better than the vacumn form plastic sails.
I would give Model Expo site a look over. They have an online catalog of all kinds of parts that you can replace plastic parts with. The link is here:
http://www.modelexpoinc.com/cgi-bin/sgsh0101.exe?SKW=TWKF@&FNM=01&UID=2005042109383022
Just a thought