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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!

Very nice model! I believe this one was from a Spanish maker called "Golden Kits."

Welcome aboard! Good to see another SC person here, though I am a transplant.

Outstanding! There's a lot to be learned about working with wood, even in a small project. Really looking forward to seeing how this one turns out -- there's a niche to be filled in the kit market, brought about when Midwest Products decided to drop their line of small boats.

Welcome, Darren! I built a small model of a sailing pirogue out of cardstock, using a plan out of one of Philip Bolger's books.

Your models have a lot of charm, Javier.

None of us were! Hard to believe that was seven years ago now. As to the question about drag, I don't know the answer, but I bet that Chappelle discussed it in either Baltimore Clippers or Search for Speed Under Sail.

Yep, it's called drag.

Wow. I can remember when I built this kit (twenty years ago now) that I had some variation in the cannon heights relative to the bulwarks, but at least all of them pointed through the gunports. You've got quite a discrepancy there, and I'm not sure how that might have happened. It does look like you applied the pattern strips at the correct height, i.e. level with the tops of the bulkhead extensions. Come to think of it, though, your deck planks look overly thick. Are you using the correct strips? Deck strips are usually pretty thin. Those look like they may be first planking strips?

The wake looks pretty convincing to my eye.

I, too, did not use most of the PE eyebolts that came in my MK gunboat kit. That's one item, IMO, that does not add much, if any, value to the kit. I use blackened, annealed wire to make mine, and it is simply so much quicker and easier to make them from scratch than to cut the tiny PE versions from a fret, file them to shape, and then blacken them. Plus, the wire ones are easier to set into the pilot hole.

Great job on the scuppers!

Welcome aboard! I built model rockets back in my youth. After each successful launch, I would paint a ring around the rocket's nose. The most rings any rocket ever received was five -- usually they met some sad (but often memorable) end before then. Cheers!

Here. Cheers!

I think the caulking looks good, but I do think that the dark planking in the middle looks odd, regardless of whether it is historically correct. I don't know any Coldplay songs, so no problem. 😉

Well, yes and no. I agree with YT that the profile formers didn't receive enough shaping. To sand those bent portions round, you'll need to remove a significant amount of wood, which will weaken the first layer at the point of attachment. The second layer can and does hide a multitude of planking sins, but I think it's a good idea to get the shape more or less correct with the first layer. I'll be interested to see how this works out going forward! Cheers!

I agree with Druxey. To my knowledge, there are no kits of any of those subjects. You are blazing a new trail, friend!

You have my sympathy, Peter -- coping with dementia is definitely a challenge, and not one of the fun variety.

Eric, I changed the title -- that should make things clearer.