as one (of far too many) asides to a Revell Kearsarge conversion (into 1864 fit, currently building the armament; I guess within this decade I’ll finally start sanding down, reshaping and re-detailing the hull…) recently this kit appeared on my desk. As my references on this type of warship are rather meagre, I wonder whether anyone could either point me towards decent sources or highlighten what there is to know about this particular kit.
I suspect it to be an old Pyro/LifeLike mold, as it comes with hard plastic sails moulded onto the spars, which gives an interesting solidish look to it…
I suspect it is indeed an old Pyro kit - but my basis for that is simply that I’ve never heard of another plastic bomb ketch. I’ve never seen it in a Revell box. But it certainly sounds like the old Pyro one.
There are a couple of excellent sources on bomb ketches, both from the Conway Maritime Press. A volume in the “Anatomy of the Ship” series, The Bomb Vessel Granado, by Peter Goodwin, deals in extraordinary detail with that particular ship. And the same publisher’s “Ship Type” series includes a volume titled Bomb Vessel: Shore Bombardment Ships of the Age of Sail, by Chris Ware. Both, fortunately (and unlike many of Conway’s best books) are currently in print.
Be warned: those books will make it painfully obvious that the old Pyro kit only vaguely represents reality. You may, in fact, conclude that starting from scratch would be easier. But good luck. Bomb ketches are fascinating vessels.
Thanks for the literature tip! Somehow I guess instead of being a leasurely distraction from the Kearsarge this will be another project of glacial dimensions…
Lindberg also used these molds.I’ve got it in my stash.The Bomb ketch is not a bad model.If you change mast out to wood and few other lttle details you can it make look
nice.A few years back in The Model Ship Builders magazine(now defunct) a guy did a build on I believe the Revell kit. Pretty good article.Tomorrow I’ll check my archival Cd to see what year and month.I’ve had in my thoughts to do a water line of it. That big mortar in the middle of the ship makes and interesting build.
Rod
I found the article I was talking about above.Model Ship Builders Jul-Aug. 1996
Article written by Mark Lardas. The kit he used was Pyro which became a Lindberg kit ya da ya da ya da.He was trying to build the Garando version. He figured the model scaled out at 1/210. He changed out the Bow Sprit and rigged his own shrouds and rats. Then also put cloth sails on her.Its a pretty fair article.
While I have the podium.My biggest loss is Model Ship Builders Mag.That was a terrfic Mag.They did a lot of articles on plastic ship modeling along with there wood articles.But since they were bought out by Ships in Scale the plastic articles have pretty much gone south. They seem to cater to the RC guys and wood builders only. I dropped my subscription a couple of years ago because of that. To bad there’s quite a few plastic ship modelers around. Like Jtilley has said in the past. We’ve been kinda forgotten about in the modeling world.Thats my wine for today.
Rod
I think millard is right: the old magazine did carry more articles about plastic kits. The new replacement, Ships in Scale, does cover them, but articles on that sort of model seem to be scarcer in it. I have no idea whether that’s a result of conscious editorial policy; I suspect it may not be. The solemn, unfortunate truth seems to be that not many people are building serious scale models of sailing ships from plastic kits these days.
A few minutes’ thought and a quick trip to the hobby shop will give some hints as to why that’s the case. The number of plastic sailing ship kits on the market has fallen disastrously in the past few years. Revell used to offer the biggest range in the world. The current Revell-Monogram catalog contains precisely two sailing vessel kits - and both represent the same ship. (One of those kits is celebrating its 40th birthday this year; the other will observe its 50th next year. Revell hasn’t released a new sailing ship kit since 1977.) Lindberg is selling a dozen or two sailing ship kits - all of them at least 30 years old. The Revell-Germany line is a little bigger than that of Revell-Monogram; Airfix and Heller both offer a handful of sailing ships. But the typical consumer won’t find them on the the shelves of the average hobby shop. The handful of die-hard enthusiasts relies on swap meets and E-bay.
I have no idea how many submissions about sailing ship models cross the desk of the editor of Ships in Scale, but I suspect it isn’t many. And I have to confess that if I were that editor, I’d have some reservations about publishing a lengthy article about a model based on a kit that’s not available.
I wish this phase of the hobby would get more popular. But at this point I’m not prepared to blame much of its unpopularity on the magazines.
I do see some faint reasons for hope. Most of the old - and excellent - Imai sailing ship kits are back on the market. (Minicraft has reissued almost all the 1/350 sail training ships, and a lot of the bigger ones are reappearing under the Aoshima label - though at outlandish prices.) And Zvezda and Trumpeter have actually issued a handful of genuinely new kits in the past few years. I’m particularly interested in the forthcoming Hanseatic cog from Zvezda. It’s mighty expensive (about $80), but if it’s at all decent it should plug a big hole in the available range: for a long time there have been scarcely any good sailing ship kits suitable for newcomers. I just hope Imai and Zvezda don’t shoot themselves in the foot (feet?) with their extravagant pricing policies. If these new kits turn out to be duds in terms of sales, the manufacturers just may give up on this phase of the hobby completely.
One other thought on all this. Quite a long time ago the model railroading fraternity figured out that lots of different materials and media have appropriate places in their hobby. There was a time when some model railroaders turned up their noses at plastic rolling stock and locomotives, but those days are over. (So, unfortunately, are the days of low-priced rolling stock and locomotives.) Nowadays every knowledgeable model railroader knows that wood, styrene, brass, copper, steel, and lots of other materials all have their uses in the hobby. I really wish the ship modeling fraternity would grow up and realize the same thing. There’s no reason to identify somebody as “a plastic modeler” or “a wood modeler.” Why can’t we all just be ship modelers?
I agree with J Tilley to the extent that he said Model Ship Builder had a number of good articles (I hope that the five I wrote were among them) but must rspectfully disagree with his premise that an equal number were junk, and that the editors knew nothing about ship modeling. I knew the editor Jeff Phillips personally and felt he was very knowledgeable about the world of shipmodeling. He left the magazine to take over the curatorship of a maritime museum which certainly speaks well of his knowledge about the sea.To base an opinion of a magazine on the fact that an editor did not catch the occasional writer’s error about an esoteric point of ship lore is not particularly useful IMHO. I subscribed to MSB back in the days of its beginnings and still retain as reference the magazines. I had occasion the other day to refer to a three-part article by Alan Raven on the blockade runner HOPE and, paging through the other articles in the three issues, was reminded of the high quality of the magazine. I wish I could say the same about the remaining ship modeling magazine to which I no longer subscribe.
I do believe Al Blevins and I may be talking about different magazines - and the mistake is mine. I apologize; I’ve deleted the paragraph in question from my earlier post.
A couple of magazines about ship modeling, with roughly similar graphics, were being published in the U.S. back in the seventies. My halfzeimer’s-afflicted brain is having trouble at the moment remembering the name of the other one - and that’s the one I was referring to earlier. It went out of business after a couple of years, if I remember correctly. I don’t know the name of its editor, but it certainly wasn’t Mr. Phillips.
On other occasions I’ve warned the Forum membership about my memory. This appears to be a case of its having gone haywire.
I do feel obliged to stick up for Ships in Scale. Its content varies quite a bit, in terms of the sophistication of the models and, frankly, in terms of how much the articles interest me personally. (There’s been more than one occasion when I’ve browsed through an entire issue in a few minutes and not bothered to pick it up again.) But I’m inclined to think that’s almost inevitable with this kind of publication. Ship modeling is a broad field, and there just aren’t a whole lot of people taking part in any one phase of it. (A journal devoted entirely to plastic sailing ship models would, I suspect, go out of business in a few months due to lack of submissions.) It looks to me like the folks in charge of Ships in Scale are doing the best they can to combine a broad range of subject matter (in terms of sophistication and topics) with some reasonably high editorial standards. I wish every issue was full of stuff that matched my particular interests, but I fear it just isn’t realistic to expect that to happen.
That’s quite all right Mr. Tilley, I have the same problem. Before there was “Model Ship Builder” there was a magazine called “Model Ships and Boats” (cover price $1.75!) that ran from Early 1976 to January of 1979. “Model Ship Builder” began in September 1979 with many of the same writers and pretty much the same format. I did not take the time to read the whole explanation but I seem to remember that MSB picked up the unexpired subscriptions to MS&B, wouldn’t swear to it though. Scottie Dayton (current editor of the Nautical Research Journal) was once an editor of MSB prior to Jeff Phillips.
I used to buy Model Ship Builder issues every now and then, if there was something of interest in it. My complaint with the mag was that it over-did the serialization of articles-- "Building the Garbage Scow "Hefty, part 14… good grief! I exagerate, but you get the idea…
SiS suffers from this to some effect, but there are more articles per issue, so an individual issue is less likely to be dragged down by having a major part of the issue about some dull subject…
I’m getting a little uncomfortable about this thread. It’s largely my fault that it seems to have drifted in the direction of criticism; that’s a mistake on my part. I confess to having some pretty strong opinions - positive, negative, and mixed - about various magazines, but I feel more than a little awkward airing those opinions in this particular venue. (It is, after all, sponsored by one of those publications.) It’s not for me to suggest what the other participants should talk about, but I personally would feel much more comfortable if we could get back to bomb ketches.
I suspect I’m not the only one who got his first exposure to this ship type through C.S. Forester’s novel Commodore Hornblower. Hornblower takes a squadron, including a pair of bomb ketches, to the Baltic in 1812, and we get to read in considerable detail just how they worked. It’s fascinating stuff. Unfortunately it’s also an example - a very rare one - of Forester making a goof. The British navy abandoned the ketch-rigged bomb vessel in the middle of the eighteenth century. By 1812 all of the Royal Navy’s “bombs” were ship-rigged. (I should perhaps add that I’m a long-time member of the Hornblower Fan Club. I’ve been trying for some time now to get enthused about the Patrick O’Brian novels, and I think they’re great, but I’m still in the Forester camp.)
The British firm Calder Craft (aka Jotika) makes a wood kit representing the earlier bomb ketch Grenado (the same vessel that’s covered in the above-mentioned Anatomy of the Ship book). I’ve never bought a Calder kit (they’re a bit to expensive for my blood), but on the basis of all the photos and reviews I’ve seen it’s an outstanding product. Calder is one of three wood kit companies (the other two being Model Shipways and Bluejacket) whose products I can comfortably recommend to people interested in serious scale modeling. That bomb ketch would, I suspect, be a great way to break into wood ship modeling.
I too am a fan of Hornblower and have recently reread several of the books. I also like O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey character. I enjoyed the book Mr. Tilley mentioned and was particularly interested in the bomb ketches, historically accurate or not. I purchased Goodwin’s AOTS book “Granado” with the intent of building a model of the subject vessel but just never seemed to get around to it. A few years ago I had an opportunity to kitbash a European wood model into the unrigged bomb vessel “Thunder” and was quite pleased with the results.