jspencer78

This topic has been moribund for over six months but let a noob stick his ten cents in. Many years ago when I was living in England I got very interested in wooden warships having visited the Victory on several occasions and watching the raising of the Mary Rose. A friend suggested building a model and I picked for my first kit the Corel Unicorn. As someone here pointed out happens, I seriously underestimated the amount of time modeling with wood. I ended up getting the hull completed with it's first planking but eventually spent less and less time on it. Then when I moved back to the USI opted not to bring it with me (the hull had a serious banana curve in it and I didn't see myself finishing it. A few years later, I tried a somewhat less large scale effort, the Model Shipways Bluenose. This went well but I never could get myself very interested in the boat itself, still being more interested in fighting vessels. The hull is complete (without a banana curve this time!) but again I lost interest even though this kit was coming along a lot faster than the Unicorn did. Finally, of all the silly little things to do, I had received a bonus gift with the Bluenose of a Midwest kit for a Chesapeake 17 kayak. With detailed instructions and very few parts, this went together quickly and beautifully. While I had to deal with a lot of the same issues that I had with both the Unicorn and the Bluenose, I managed to get a finished product fairly quickly. Now I am starting an Armed Virginia Sloop knowing that with patience I have the skills to manage this and get it done eventually. The point of all this is that for me, I would recommend entry level based on the following, all of which have been mentioned above: 1) You gotta be interested in what you are building. 2) There is merit to the European kit builders use of "quantity" to define difficulty: a three masted line of battle ship is more difficult than a one masted sloop even if the skills needed are essentially the same as it will take a LOT longer to build the ship, time the beginner is typically not prepared for yet. 3) The plans and instructions need to be detailed enough so that the first time kit builder doesn't have to guess as to what to do. Things slow to a crawl if you not only have to learn how to perform the basic tasks of working with wood but also have to figure out what task comes next. 4) The kit needs to be of a high enough quality that the newcomer doesn't have to fight the kit itself. There should be enough material that the kit can be built albeit that most people will need some additional materials to fix errors. Spence