ccoyle

Love the old biplanes! You going to dress her up as a private aircraft or an RAF trainer?

Pretty good for a month's work!

Ditto on the waiting for pictures. I'm fascinated by the twilight years of commercial sail in the 20th century -- looking forward to seeing this project come together.

It would be fascinating to see a thread that documents the entire process of producing a kit at Amati, from initial concept all the way through to packaging & shipping. When I first started my career as a textbook writer, I was amazed at how big the operation was -- much larger than I had imagined. I'm sure that there are parallels in the model kit industry.

I concur! I have often said that these guys (and gals) must have a gene that makes them natural-born card modelers.

I'm sure there are a great many modelers around here who sincerely hope that this will be so.

The original looks like it endured a lot of varnishing! I like the look of the restored bits. Cheers!

Great kit and great review, too!

Well done, Danny.

Wow! She looks great!

Looking very handsome there, Fernando!

Is it the Model Shipways kit? If so, I'd be surprised that a flag wasn't included. I'm sure that they sell some on their website.

Hello, Sarge! I was a little alarmed when I read your first post, because I initially thought that this kit might be a knock-off version of the 1/200 scale kit from Mantua. But after comparing the two kits, it's apparent that this is an indigenous design. I looked at the listing on Amazon and saw that the kit had a lot of negative reviews, which I think may be partly due to the kit being described as a "3D wooden puzzle." Anyone who buys this kit thinking that it is merely a puzzle will of course be sorely disappointed. Any 1/200 scale kit of a sailing man o' war will of necessity have a number of design compromises, so the fact that you have gotten as far as you have already is a testament to a certain amount of perseverance on your part. Best of luck to you as you near completion! BTW, it was very sweet of your admiral to purchase a kit for you, but should she be inclined to repeat the act, have her take a glance at our policy on pirated kits here (it will also explain my initial alarm expressed above). Cheers!

Hello, Tony! I can't answer your question either, but welcome aboard!

I would use a matte varnish. Real decks have little, if any, hint of shininess.

Very generous of you, Ron!

We really have a fine crop of miniaturists sharing their work with us these days! I look forward to seeing more installments.

This is coming together very well -- love the look so far!

This kit was an early design by Chris Watton for Caldercraft's "Nelson's Navy" line of kits. Chris is an innovative designer who is well-known and respected in the modeling community. Those early Caldercraft kits were cutting-edge in their day and are still great models twenty years on. We have a number of examples here, both finished and in progress, for instance here and here. You'll not be disappointed.

Fighting the Great War at Sea: Strategy, Tactics and Technology Norman Friedman Barnsley, UK: Seaforth Publishing, 2019 24.5 x 29 cm format, paperback, 416 pages 300 B&W illustrations, end notes, sources, index MSRP £25.00 ISBN: 978 1 5267 6549 9 Fighting the Great War at Sea (FTGWAS) is not the sort of book that will appeal to all readers. I’ll get to the reasons why in a moment, but first let’s take a quick look at what’s between the covers. The book is 352 pages of text divided into an introduction and sixteen chapters. The chapters are: 1. A Maritime War 2. Resources 3. Blockade, Trade War and Economic Attack 4. Expectations versus Reality 5. The Fleets 6. The Chessboard—Naval Geography 7. Fleets in Battle 8. Capital Ships 9. Inshore Operations and an Inshore Fleet 10. The Battle of the Narrow Seas 11. Submarines 12. Protecting Trade: The U-Boat War 13. Anti-Submarine Warfare: Tactics and Technology 14. The Anti-Submarine Armada 15. Mine Warfare 16. Lessons for the Future The text is copiously illustrated with black-and-white photographs. Following the main text are a whopping forty-two pages of notes, three pages of sources, and a four-page index. Okay, now let’s get down to brass tacks—what is the armchair historian getting for his money? The first thing that any potential buyer may want to take notice of is the table of contents. If you go back and look at it again carefully, something should become apparent to you, namely that FTGWAS is not a chronological narrative of events at sea. Rather, it is a topical treatment of the war. I didn’t figure this out for myself until I was well into Chapter 7. I had presumed—wrongly as it turned out—that Chapters 1–6 were introductory material. The truth hit me when the first fleet action described in Chapter 7 turned out to be the Yarmouth Raid of 3 November 1914. Immediately I wondered why the text had skipped over the Battle of Heligoland Bight, which took place in August of that year. Out of curiosity, I flipped to the index and looked up every mention of the latter battle. None of the six indexed references was an actual description of the battle. The realization that I was not going to get a chronological treatment of events after all was, for me, rather deflating. It turns out that FTGWAS is not really a history so much as an analysis, and a very thorough analysis, as is evidenced by the lengthy notes section. When read as such, the reader will find that the author has done a very respectable job of breaking down strategy, tactics, weapons development, and the like—all of the things listed in the table of contents. With this in mind, the reader is more or less freed to pick and choose which chapters to read and which to skip, since the material in each chapter can be considered as a stand-alone topic. But here is something else the casual reader should be advised of: the words “thorough analysis” should give a hint as to the length of the book. It is indeed a very, very long book. This isn’t evident at first glance; after all, 352 pages is not an unusually large number for a history book. However, the text is printed in small type and laid out in two columns, which means that the 352 pages of text are more like 1300 pages of reading. It can be a slog. And did I mention that the book is also large and heavy? Something else about FTGWAS didn’t strike me with full force until I was about half-way through the book, namely that although the book is lavishly illustrated, it does not have a lot of visual elements. By this I mean that there is a complete absence of infographics and ancillary content. There are no maps, graphs, tables, cut-aways, diagrams, color plates, lists of technical data, biographical notes, or any of the other various elements that can make a book visually engaging for the casual reader (I write textbooks for secondary students for a living—can you tell?). That can make the text even more of a slog than just the sheer volume of words alone. As you can probably tell, FTGWAS did not have a great deal of appeal for me personally, but by saying that I do not mean any disparagement. The author definitely knows his subject inside and out, as is demonstrated, as just one example, by his detailed knowledge of the various war plans, fleet exercises, and ship building programs of all the major combatants during the pre-war years. For this reason, FTGWAS can definitely be recommended to anyone who is a serious scholar of the naval side of the Great War. The numerous photos alone will get the rest of us to flip through all the pages at least once—and possibly to even read a few. CDC

I built this kit long ago, but can't remember any glaze being called for. Is it intended to hold the sail's shape? It's not an absolute requirement. Very dilute white glue will also do the trick.

Wirklich erstaunlich! Really amazing!

Try push pins -- the kind with the plastic head. And be sure to drill pilot holes to make the job easier and reduce splitting.

One thing that I do not like about false decks, and this is an issue in most kits, is that while the deck can be pinned down wherever it lies atop a bulkhead, the little flaps in between the bulkheads have no such substructure; they can still flex, resulting in a slight undulation along the deck edge. The "waviness" might not be readily visible, but it can play havoc with things like properly aligning cannons with their ports. Rubber bands will make that problem worse, because of course they will exert a downward force in exactly the wrong places, i.e. between bulkhead extensions. To properly address the issue, some kind of ledges need to be provided between the bulkheads for the deck to be fixed to.

This will be quite an undertaking! I wish you every success as you begin. Cheers!