I’m looking for The English instructions for Heller’s Soliel Royal, possibly from the Aurora kit. I’d appreciate any help in obtaining them. Thanks, Marc
Welcome to the Forum!
We’ve discussed this kit pretty extensively here. (The longest thread is this one: /forums/t/68138.aspx?PageIndex=1 . It contains a considerable amount of contentious argument from quite a few people, including me. Please take a look at it, read all sides of the arguments, and come to your own conclusions.)
One point on which, I think, everybody who’s tackled that kit can agree: the instructions are garbage. The original French ones are far from ideal, and the English “translation” is worse. Caveat: the kit has been released quite a few times over the years, and it’s possible that a new edition of the English “instructions” has been inserted at some time. The kit I built was one of the first (back in the seventies), and the English versions I’ve seen since then have all been identical to the one I got. But maybe there’s a better one out there somewhere.
There are two basic problems.
One - the people who designed the kit didn’t understand rigging (among numerous other aspects of ship construction). The solution to that problem, fortunately, is pretty simple and economical. Get hold of a copy of R.C. Anderson’s book*, The Rigging of Ships in the Days of the Spritsail Topmast, 1600-1720*. (It’s available in cheap paperback reprint form from Dover Books. Used copies can be found on the web for less than $10.00.) My strong recommendation: throw out the Heller rigging instructions and let Dr. Anderson be your guide.
Two - the English “translation” apparently was written by somebody who (a) didn’t understand French, and (b) hadn’t attempted to build the model. The document really isn’t a translation per se; the “author” apparently just looked at the pictures and jotted down some notes, in English, on what he saw. (The first clue: he thought “le mat de misaine” was the mizzen mast. It isn’t. It’s the fore mast. The mizzen mast is “le mat d’artimon.”) It’s highly unlikely that this document will provide the English-speaking modeler with anything he can’t figure out for himself on the basis of the diagrams.
As I said earlier, it’s possible that, sometime in this kit’s long and convoluted history, Heller got some competent person to write a genuine English-language instruction manual for it. I certainly hope so; for a manufacturer to include a piece of garbage like the version that came with mine in a kit that costs that much money is downright scandalous.
I fear I haven’t helped mdpape much - if at all - but maybe I’ve saved him a wild goose chase. Believe me, those “English instructions” aren’t worth the effort to seek them out.
Good luck with your model, though.
Here might be a possible option nowadays. Type in the French phrases on some kind of web page that allows you to type into it, and let Google translate it to English. Maybe it would come out as more understandable than the English version that comes with the kit. Has anyone tried this yet?
That’s a good idea, tucchase. I don’t know whether the various Google translators can handle nautical jargon, but they can’t be any worse than the…whatever he was…who was responsible for the travesty in the Heller kit.
When I was working on mine I lucked out. I found, on the bookshelves of the old family house in Ohio, an old English-French/French-English dictionary that contained just about every word in the original French version of the Heller instructions. In retrospect, I probably could have gotten along without it (the diagrams actually are pretty good - except for the rigging), but it was kind of fun to look up the French equivalents of words like “spritsail top mast” (“le mat de petit peroquet”).
Believe me, Google translator is’nt worth a dime… I speak in Lithuanian, German, Russian, Polish and English (English is my worst of spoken language), and i have try some experiments with these languages in Google translator - it was very funny 
Take French - English dictionary ant try to translate by yourself.
Hello and welcome!
I have the instructions and would be very happy to copy them for you. Please email your address.
Bill Morrison