Megahobby seems to have a great selection of sailing ships. Two of them are 1:96 Revell Constitutions. Revell/Monogram has the # 398 kit for $60, and Revell Germany has another kit for $97. The German version is suppose to be the same scale, yet it is 6 inches longer and has 73 additional parts.
Does anyone know how these two kits differ?
Correction: The German version is suppose to be 7 inches longer!
I’m 99.999% sure they’re the same kit. Revell Germany is notorious for botching up things like scale measurements and dimensions in its advertising and boxtop copy. I have no idea where the discrepancy in the parts count comes from, but I suspect it’s either an outright mistake or the result of somebody counting components that somebody else didn’t. (Did they count the spools of thread? The individual “ratline” assemblies? The crew figures? The piece of clear plastic for the transom and quarter gallery windows?)
I haven’t actually looked at either kit for a good many years, but several members of this Forum have commented that Revell Germany’s quality control leaves a great deal to be desired. There are lots of complaints of warped parts, broken parts, etc., etc. I don’t know whether the American-produced ones are categorically better or not.
Bottom line: it’s a fine old kit - an extremely sound basis for a good scale model. But it’s also an old kit (42 years old, to be exact), and it shows it. In its defense, when I was 42 years old I looked considerably worse.
I have had both kits within the last year. They are identical. All parts interchange exactly. And yes, the German kit suffers from a lack of quality control making some of the parts unusable. Example, warped main top gallant mast. The rigging thread supplied is totally useless for a model. The only one thing that the German model has is an extra couple of pages in the instruction book giving a layout of all the parts and numbers.
Dr. Tilley is quite correct in his remarks as usual. I do not why a hobby store would stock an inferior model at a much inflated price. Perhaps it has something to do with Revell/Germany’s merchandising policy. My suggestion would be to stick with the Revell model made in China.