Santa Maria Caravelle by GGibson - Ships of Pavel Nikitin - 1:48

[neilm]

Coming on just great. The kit is not perfect by any means but our modelling skills are what it is all about.   Lovely build. 

[Snug Harbor Johnny]

    Eastern Europe has a long history of sophisticated paper modeling of all sorts of things.  Of course paper is thin enough to be viewed as a two-dimensional material, and paper model design flows from how one can bend, twist, roll and otherwise join 2 dimensional components.  I wonder if  this background (school of thought or shared history?) is reflected in more recent kits coming from Eastern Europe.

    Model kits (non-ship) from U-Gears are laser cut on thicker wood stock, thus have a third dimension.  But the U-Gears offerings are built like puzzles without having to bend pieces (for the most part).  The Nitkin ship kits have a mixture of thick and thin wood parts, and the the planking does require bending.  The pre-cut shapes of all the planks likely correspond to a certain "perfect" hull shape (determined in the design phase).  The hull frames do have lines on each side to serve as a guide for how to fair them ... but get the builder only 'so close' to the theoretical ideal.  Fairing is a tricky (artistic, actually) process where not trimming/sanding quite enough versus going too far can be measured in thousands of an inch (or hundredths of a millimeter).

 

    Perfectly 'faired' hulls (whether frames or bulkheads, with filler wood or not) won't have any 'kinks' or 'dips' in planking (or springy wire used to lay over a hull in progress to judge the fairing process) put over the exterior.  A plank length designed to fit perfectly over an ideal faired distance will appear short or long in its place depending if the fairing along the hull covered by that plank is not exact.  There's the rub!  2-D laser cutting cannot pre-fair ship frames, and frame assembly also produces slight positional variations in the framing that even 'assembly jigs' (on smaller models) can't completely prevent.

 

    With regular plank-on-bulkhead kits, one must cut, shape and fit one's own planks from long pieces of planking stock to conform to whatever fairing shape the modeler happens to have achieved on the hull.  This may seem inconvenient to some, but the result will be appropriate for the hull being built.  The concept of a 'fully engineered' kit where all the shapes have been pre-determined and will 'fit like a glove' is alluring indeed - but I fear that it will likely remain something of a "Holy Grail".  We're forced to deal with at least a few assembly variables that still require a modeler to 'work around' a few surprises.  But isn't that what model ship building is all about?  So I wouldn't be too hard on Pavel because of the very high (and difficult) bar he's aiming for, and consider the 'partnership' of sorts that exist between kit designer and model builder.

 

    Consider the words of old Einar Billing, founder of Billing Boats:  "The most important point is that this kit is intended to be built, and not merely assembled.  In consequence, you must not expect the parts to fit together perfectly - it will be necessary to exercise skill and imagination in the building of this kit.  I have tried to make the parts as accurate, and the instructions as precise as possible - but thought and care should be exercised during the construction.  After all, any child can put a puzzle together.  I wish you a lot of success in building your model."