ccoyle

Oh, boy! My BS degree is in fisheries science, and I worked in salmonid habitat restoration for five years before making the first of two mid-life career changes. Welcome aboard!

I like to invest a little bit of myself in each of my models. In this instance I literally invested some of myself after accidentally puncturing myself with a piece of wire and subsequently bleeding on my model while I worked on it. Fortunately, all of the affected areas will eventually be covered. 🫤

Superb as usual, Greg!

Thank you, Andrew. The wales come pre-stained in the kit (that is, I assume they are stained -- I don't think they're cut from ebony or similar). They get a little abused during the planking process, so they will need some touch-up when the planking is completed. I remember your charming little TSS Earnslaw. I have a number of passenger ships in my stash from both Paper Shipwright and HMV -- I need to break out one of the medium-ish ones sometime.

A fantastic result, and ditto to what Kurt said!

So, the winner of the recent D.VI fiasco, which you can read about here if you have the stomach for that sort of thing, is my Phoenix build. Yes, I decided it's time to move this build along some. I have added the first layer of the wales.

He is a prolific designer, and many publishers have issued his models, including Models by Marek (digital), MPModels, Modelarstwo Kartonowe, and probably others that I've either forgotten about or am simply not acquainted with. If you buy and or build enough kits, you learn to recognize the work of various designers based on a kit's appearance. Oftentimes, the names of a kit's designer and graphic artist are available on a vendor's website.

Those are all plans published by kit manufacturers. Since they are published by different entities, it's impossible to make a blanket evaluation of the quality of the entire group. Some will be better than others in terms of detail, accuracy, and completeness.

I'd say it's a combination of both for this kit. I don't like to speak ill of the people (designers) who make this hobby possible, but I've had trouble with every Marek Pacynski kit I've attempted, and I've received feedback from other card modelers with similar experiences with Mr. Pacynski's work. To his credit, I have seen very fine examples of completed kits designed by Mr. Pacynski, but I'm becoming increasingly less interested in trying another of his kits and hoping I've found one of the good ones. I have plenty of kits in my stash from designers whose work I can rely on.

Welcome aboard! Check out the kits from Modellers Shipyard. They're an Aussie outfit with a good reputation, and they offer some suitable beginner kits.

Also not a 2nd or 3rd rate, but the point is still valid.

That is going to be slim pickings. French subjects are somewhat neglected by kit manufacturers, and a 2nd or 3rd rate in 1/48 would be a massive kit. For that subject and scale, you're looking at scratch-building.

Well, friends, I have made an executive decision on this model, and maybe you saw this coming. I sat down to attempt skinning the lower wing, and dry-fitting revealed several problems: The ribs are too long and need to be trimmed (this was the least problematic issue and could have been easily dealt with if it had been the only problem). The wing framing itself is too short from root to tip, i.e., shorter than the wing skin. When the wing skin is held tight to the fuselage, the skin overlaps the outboard rib by at least a millimeter, meaning the upper and lower wingtips, which are separate parts, have no sub-structure to adhere to. And lastly, there is simply no way to make the wing root join neatly (i.e., flush) to the fuselage without doing some significant surgery -- there are significant gaps on both the upper and lower surfaces. None of these issues is insurmountable, but they are individually annoying and collectively beyond annoying: they simply make the model not fun to build. And model building should be fun. IMO, a designer whose kits are not fun to build is asking me to invest more creative problem-solving into his design than he could be bothered with himself before the design went to print. Any card model requires a bit of such effort here and there, but this kit seems to be dogged by fun-killing design issues at every step. As I stated somewhere earlier in this thread, this may be why I was unable to find any finished examples of this kit online. So, this kit has been moved to the Shelf of Shame, and I will now take some time to think hard about what to work on next. That Sakae radial in resin might be hard to resist . . .

Why does it have to be a European -- I have some experience with this, ya know! 😅 Seriously, though, as far as airplanes go, anything designed by Pawel Mistewicz is sure to be "glueable," as the Poles say. Andrzej Halinski also comes immediately to mind. I have also had good success with kits designed by Lech Kołodziejski, Krzysztof Fiolek, and J. Janukowicz. Happily, I have many kits designed by those gentlemen still in my stash! I have pretty narrow interests when it comes to ships, therefore all of my ship builds have come from one of only three publishers: Paper Shipwright, HMV, or Seahorse. I would recommend any of those without reservation.

Good luck on your project!

Continuing to slog along on this model. Next up we have the lower wing. The construction method is dodgy IMO. The two spars must be passed through the fuselage before the wing can be completely assembled, i.e., one can't assemble the entire wing off the model and then mate it to the fuselage. At best you can assemble half the wing, run the spars through the fuselage, and then finish the other half. But there are other problems as well. As mentioned before, the laser cut frames are too thick, which means the slots where they interlock are too narrow, so they must be widened. Then, once I got the spars inserted through the fuselage, I discovered that the fuselage sides covered about half of the slots for the inboard ribs (of which there are only two per side). That meant I had to carefully reduce the thickness of each rib at its two slots down to about one-quarter of its original thickness, which makes each rib very weak, even when soaked in CA. It's no surprise, then, that one of them broke during assembly. And the icing on the cake: After I got everything assembled, I discovered that the wings are not perpendicular to the fuselage center line. 😑 I am edging dangerously close to the point where I start thinking about other, better-designed kits that I could be working on. 😒

Well done! Congrats!

Welcome aboard, Dave!

Turned out great!

Well done, Paul!

Congrats on completing a very striking model!

Great job, Tom!

This old box-scale kit is one of the earliest kits I can remember building as a kid of probably 7 or 8 years old. I definitely wasn't concerned with kit accuracy or super-detailing at that age!

Check the guidelines for sellers. You might get a few more nibbles. Personally, I love that kit, but the bowsprit alone demands more space than I have available.

Man, I didn't even remember that bit. 🤔