Turil

Thank you so much for your incredibly helpful responses. Especially @Bob Cleek!

Hello everyone! I have no idea how I ended up on this forum, but I'm glad I did. I'd like to start building wooden ship models and have a few questions. But before I get to that maybe a sentence or two about me: I've built plastic airplane models as a kid, then had a very long hiatus and came back to the hobby via Games Workshop Warhammer 40k (a tabletop game) in recent years. However, I enjoyed building the models or little dioramas always much more than playing the game. Any modelling tool manufacturers you can recommend or any that I should avoid? Unfortunately I don't have any of my previous tools anymore and am starting from scratch. Apart from the obvious tools, what kind of useful helpers would you recommend? I noticed for example on Amati's website things like the loom-a-line rigging jig. Is that handy to have or wasted money? Or this hull support contraption from Artesania Latina. The reason I'm asking is that I'd prefer to purchase these things together with the first model kit, even when I don't need them right away, instead of having to pay for the shipping twice. I live in Austria and most shipping costs are quite high, which brings me to my next question: Can anyone recommend an European reseller of the "Model Shipways Lowell Grand Banks Dory" kit? Modelexpo-online would ship it to Austria, for 75,- USD shipping. Ouch! And that is before taxes and import fees. I have a really hard time deciding between Artesiana's "Virginia" Schooner model kit, Amati's Viking longboat and Amati's Endeavour 1:80 kit with tools - I really like how detailed Artesiana's instruction booklet is and that you can download it even before the purchase to check it out. On the other hand, for the Viking longboat I would not need to paint much (because that is another rabbit hole, right?) and the 1:80 Endeavour kit comes with a few tools and seems to have multiple build logs here, which would alleviate the not-so-great instructions it comes with. In general, what is the smallest scale where a model allows to have enough details to look like a model and not a toy with reasonable effort? All of those three are in different scales. For the time being I can't afford to have a dedicated building space, any tips / tools / contraptions that allow to safely move models under construction between the storage and the building space? Sorry that this post is quite long. Thank you for your time & help in advance!