I will build in ANY medium so long as the customers check clears the bank. But I prefere to build in plastic because of the nice detail afforded in some kits. Crackers don’t feel too bad about plastic, it ain’t that bad.
Substitute “Wanderer Whaler” for 1/600 Bismark, and your challenge is already accepted. The only “modern” warships I have any desire to model, are the ones I served in, and doing a full hull FRAM II Sumner class DD, from a 1/700 waterline kit is no laughing matter either…but I’m just crazy enough to be having fun with it.
I was mildly surprised at some of the negative comments posted about my suggestion that modelers who are dissatisfied with inferior quality kits, or unable to find a kit of the vessel of their desire, instead scratch build a model. Would someone in the vast Forum audience please explain to me what is so offensive about this opinion?
It can be done. At the risk of sounding egotistic and bombastic, I have made two sailing ship scatch built models and am preserntly working on a third model. My comment is not to promote Ships in Scale magazine, but to emphasize that this route can be successfully accomplished given the desire, proper tools and research. In just about every issue, some author submits an article of a scratch built model. Judging by the photographs with the article, the results would put me to shame on the quality of the author’s work.
As I wrote on my previous post, in my humble opinion, the inner satisfaction of completing a scatch model with out assembling plastic part A to part B after glueing, is worthwhile, to just to see the product of your own hands and know that one did not depend on a kit. By-the way, I have used popsicle sticks on my models, they make convincing deck surfaces when cut to proper scale.
Montani semper liberi ! Happy modeling to all and ever one of you.
Crackers, I think the point you have missed is the title of the thread ‘Worst ship model you have ever built!’ Until your entry, we were having a lovely time chuckling over some of our worst efforts based on some of the worst kits from the days of yore (some of which, despite all odds, that continue to be produced!). If the title of the thread was ‘Gee, I sure wish I could make perfect models of anything I wanted to,’ then your comments would have been germain, and not strike almost exactly the wrong note of egotism and bombast!
In any case… I also remember a disaster (self-inflicted!) involving a 1/700 scale ‘Kongo’ from one of the Japanese manufacturers, though I can’t remember which. It was just after the ‘waterline’ kits hit the market and I was about 10 years old, and for some reason the words ‘Waterline’ plainly printed on the box didn’t sink in at all (‘reading comprehension 101’), which I thought was merely some sort of expression to label a new line of kits. In any case, when I got home and opened the box (they wouldn’t let you open the box at the shop in those days, and if you opened, it, you bought it!), I was scandalized to find what appeared to be HALF of the model missing!! Not willing to admit my mistake by bringing the model back to the shop, I decided I would make a lower hull piece for it out of wood. As my wood-working skills in those days were almost non-existent, you can imagine it was more than a little rough! Finally, i decided that this was all going so badly, i might as well take a stab at converting the thing to its original WW1 layout by scratch-building a tripod mast, etc, but the results just got worse and worse… In any event, the Kongo, through no fault of its own, was eventually turned into a painting practise model, and for that, it served a useful purpose at last…
I’ll hack into my own thread and ask the opposite question. Which is the best Kit you hace built and why? The one that I have built and like the most is Revell’s Cutty Sark. It has just got that something about it that I have made her a least four times.
Is that the big 1/96 Cutty Sark? I built that once a long time back, and I agree, a most excellent ship model! There are a number of others I like very much too, and it is quite difficult to choose between them, as each is memorable in one way or another. ‘La Flore’ is quite good too, and can be done up in any number of different color schemes, the Revell ‘America’ was an excellent model for its day as well. Simple, but well-molded and makes up into a really attractive model (and you can play with the color scheme of that one too!)…
No doubt for me it’s the Pyro/Life-Like/Lindberg ‘American President Liner’. Very little detail and much of it wrong. Parts that don’t fit, decals that are a joke, and instructions that will lead the builder to make it less accurate.
The passage of time only makes the insult worse because Lindberg has the gall to re-issue it at over $20, but I suppose if somebody wants a base for extensive scratch building that’s better than paying even more for an old kit on eBay.
Well, i nthe spirit of this thread, the most dissappointing kit I ever built would have to be the (old) Revell SS United States…
You got only a semi-hull, the insides were completely hollow, it was box scale and not very consistently and had about seven parts.
So, it built faster than it painted, which was tough for needing only four colors of paint. and when you were done, what did you have? At least the hull bottom was flat, it’d sit on any surface it was left upon.
That ship is actually the Chicken of the Sea ship that was a restaurant at Disneyland
Only real diffirence is the art work on the stern should be a mermaid and tuna fish instead of the Jolly Roger.
There should also be a mermaid on the bow.
Twords the end before they demolished it for something else they renamed it Captain Hooks Jolly Roger and removed the mermaid off the bow and repainded the stern in one color.
At the merry age of 15, having built the big Revell Constitution with my mom during a summer, and then the Thermo and the Kearsarge on my own with newspaper money, mom bought the Aurora Bon Homme Richard for my birthday. It was a huge pile of unbuildable brown plastic, I think it had molded shroud/ratlines, and sails.
On a positive note, at about the same time I won the Revell Oriana at a contest. What a beaut! I recall a piece of metallic green paper foil that was to be glued into the bottom of the swimming pool! I’d build her again.
Edit: on a google search which found numerous examples for $ 4 or so, I came to the conclusion that my memories are probably nicer than reality. However it did yield this nice little website with online instruction sheets:
Here’s a fond memory of the good, bad and the ugly. The Aurora “Chinese Junk” which was about 1/68.
The one with the black plastic hull, and orange cast sail/ battens, big pieces they were too like about 6" square.
I had read, and this was about '63-64, Ernest Gann’s book “Soldier of Fortune”, where a sailor named Hank Lee has a black market operation in the Hong Kong underworld running illicit… well you get the picture. So he gets hired by Miss fresh-off-the-farm to go into China circa 1950 and rescue her husband who’s in jail. He has a boat, a junk, the Chicago, and pulls off the caper. But during the escape, they are pursued by a Chinese gunboat, at which point he drops the transom revealing an Oerlikon cannon, with which they bang away at their pursuers until…
BTW the book and the movie have different endings, at least the Gable one.
Lots of sweaty girl in her skimpies loading shells into , oh never mind. So I had to do it. My first kit bash, wish o wish I had her still. I used a 1/8" diameter piece of silver plastic rod from a GI Joe .30 tripod that broke in a dirt clod war in the back yard as the barrel, and I was a happy 3rd grader. Long live the Chicago!
As I think back on it, there were a lot, really a lot of fun sailing ship models back in the '60’s. We’ve all touched on quite a few, and they were all a good thing when you were a kid and had 79 cents burning a hole in your chinos. After all, Testors paint was only 15 cents.
Going back a few posts and just shooting in the dark here, but there is a province in France named Maine. It could be that they had a ship by the same name. That would be why Heller, a French company, might do one.
