This looks like a great place to visit if you are looking for some good ship modeling inspiration. Check it out if you’re anywhere close to the San Diego area.
There have been lots of wooden model sailing ships at the San Diego Maritime Museum for as long as I can remember. But, I just saw this news item on the maritime museum’s website about a model gallery exhibit in their newly created visitor annex, which is aboard the ferryboat Berkeley.
This is a very nice looking gallery of models. I wish we had one like this on the ferryboat Eureka (Berkeley’s sister ship). I will have to make a point of heading down to San Diego again one day soon to check it out.
The latest release from our friends at OcCre is a new 1/300 scale model of RMS Titanic. From their website:
On April 10, 1912, the world’s largest and most luxurious ocean liner, Titanic, set sail on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York.
She took the lives of 1,495 people and gave rise to the greatest legend in the history of maritime navigation. The Titanic did not have enough lifeboats for all the passengers, about 1,200 people, but there were about 2,223 on board.
In the early morning of April 15, 1912, the Titanic collided with an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland. The sinking of the Titanic was the largest shipwreck in the history of maritime navigation in peacetime. 1,518 people died. Only 711 people out of 2,223 survived.
Myths and legends have been created around the fatal shipwreck, making the Titanic probably the most famous ship in history.
For many years historians, treasure hunters, oceanographers and businessmen have searched for the wreck. Finally, the wreckage of the ship was discovered on September 1, 1985 by Robert Ballard during a secret mission in charge of the United States Navy. The wreck of the Titanic was located 3,784 meters deep, about 800 km off the coast of Canada.
The lights of the Titanic went out minutes before she disappeared into the Atlantic Ocean along with the dream of reaching New York.
The kit is on its way to our store, so please watch the store, Ages of Sail, or keep an eye on our blog here for an announcement of its availability. Price TBD. In the meantime, here are some photos of the new kit…
The completed 1/300 scale model measures just over 35″ long with a height of about 9-1/2″.
Shipping completed models can be very expensive. Check out this solution in a story of a ship model that flew from California to the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum in a seat aboard a United Airlines flight!
This model, by the way, was built by a member the Hyde Street Pier Model Shipwrights, of one of the local ship model clubs here in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Special congratulations are in order to our very own Commodore Paul Reck with the induction of his model of the Revolutionary War era gunboat Philadelphia into the collection of the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum!
Check out the story of how the model ended up traveling across the county in a seat on a United Airlines flight.
Paul’s model is a 1/24-scale scratch build, based on a set of plans obtained from the Smithsonian, where the original gunboat is preserved and on display. Ω
This week, Ages of Sail is at the National Retail Hobby Stores Association (NRHSA) convention in Las Vegas. This event is for manufacturers and distributors to show their products to hobby store representatives. So, if there’s something we have that you want your favorite hobby retailer to carry, be sure to let them know to come and talk to us.
Here’s something that should interest many of our customers. $10 is a pretty good deal for attending a ship modeling workshop. This one should be very popular. Apparently space is limited, but we’re not sure how limited. Just in case, if you’re interested, maybe it would be good to register ASAP.
Want to take that ordinary wooden ship model kit and make something extraordinary from it? The Nautical Research Guild has organized a workshop just for you!
On Saturday, August 21st at 10am Central, that’s a bright and early 8am for those of us on the west coast, NRG Chairperson Toni Levine will be giving a workshop “The Ship Modeler’s Ten Step Program or How to Transform Your Kit Model from Out of the Box to Out of this World”.
According to the NRG announcement today, this is a web-based workshop that requires advanced registration, which is free to NRG members, and only $10 for non-NRG members. Of course, you’ll need an Internet connected device such as a tablet, smart phone, or computer to attend. And, you’ll need to register, but space is limited. So, register soon!
For more information, including how to register, visit the NRG page here
Amati’s new wooden model kit of the German Battleship Bismarck arrived just today as part of a shipment of 6 big pallets of kits, fittings, tools, wood supplies, and more! But, we were prepared and got our online shop setup with the new kits listing. They are now online and ready for you to buy.
This is a very big kit at 1:200 scale, weighing in at around 20 pounds. This is a single planked plank-on-bulkhead wooden ship model kit, with LOTS of fittings, including more than 2200 photo-etched parts, plus two full-color instruction books, and 7 large plans sheets.This is a master model for those who want to build the ultimate challenge. But, make sure you have room for it. This amazing kit finishes up at over 4 feet long.
This paper model build is moving right along with the addition of the the thick hull planks and more. Note that at Ages of Sail we have basic kit in stock, but due to an oversight, we don’t yet carry the masting or sail sets, though we do have the blocks set.
For me, it seems that there is a danger in working on paper models. I find these things to be so engrossing that I have a hard time taking a break to do other things. I’ve been working on the Schwarzer Rabe pretty steadily for a couple weeks now. Almost a week ago, I had made a comment on Papermodelers.com that I was probably posting my last update for a while, as I get back to working on some other projects. But, I never stopped this one. Here it is, a week later, and I’m still trying to make myself shift gears and get some other needed work done. We’ll see if that happens after this post.
Disar Models recently released a very promising looking new kit of the Hermione, a 32-gun Concord-class French Navy frigate. Built in 1779, she was designed for speed and it is said that she was one of the first French Navy ships to be copper sheathed. The ship is most well known for carrying the Marquis de Lafayette to the newly declared United States, where he served as a Major General commanding American troops in the American Revolution under Washington.
AVAILABLE NOW!
The new kit from Disar Model is a big 1/72 scale kit, making it about 6″ longer than the Atesania Latina kit. So, fans of big models should appreciate this one.
The kit includes turned brass cannon, laser-cut frames, many laser-cut parts, pre-sewn sails, and an 84-page, full-color instruction booklet, and more.
One of the things that set this kit apart from others is that Disar Model gives you a full open gun deck, with 28 full cannons on full carriages. There are no dummy cannons on this ship model, and the full gun deck gives you plenty of room to customize and detail your model as you like.
Watch for this kit to show up VERY SOONAVAILABLE NOW at Ages of Sail! Ω
Part 2 of the building of Master Korabel’s 95mm ships boat kit was just posted. Clearly a challenging, but very accurately designed and well engineered kit. We currently have 3 of these MK0101 kits in stock, but we have 9 of the MK0103 68mm long yawl kits available.
While make by Master Korabel for use with their ship model kits, they should work very well for any ship model that needs a couple boats on board. The scale is specifically 1/72, but should work well for models between 1/70 and 1/80 scale or so.
Here’s the latest update on building Master Korable’s 90mm ship’s boat kit, and it looks like this build log is going to be a three-parter. Last time I left off, I had finished the framing and was about to start the hull planking. I’m happy to announce that I have completed the hull planking and about ready to finish the interior of the boat.
The hull planking went pretty well, but required some pretty careful work. The planks are very nicely pre-shaped, but they still have to be bent to fit the curve of the hull. It also takes a bit of care to glue the planks only to the ribs, and not to the framework of the temporary former.
Here’s a nice reminder that some of the most interesting sailing ship model kits aren’t made from wood. Here’s a build of one of the paper model kits from the Polish kit maker Shipyard.
In this case, one of the lesser known kits is shown here, a Dutch armed merchant ship called a “fluit” that was built in 1627. This ship, called the Schwarzer Rabe, which is German for “Black Crow”, took part in the naval engagement called the Battle of Oliwa, on the side of the Polish-Lithuanian fleet.
As you may have noticed, I’ve now officially elevated this build of Shipyard’s 1/96-scale paper model kit of the Dutch fluit Schwarzer Rabe to a full fledged project, with its own place in my Ship Model Build Logs menu.
It seems that after completing the 1/72-scale Hanse Kogge Bremen laser-cut paper model, for which I did not maintain a build log here, I was itching to keep up with the paper models. I wasn’t really sure if I had been doing a good enough job with my Dutch fluit Schwarzer Rabe, but I thought I should give it a chance. So, I continued the build this weekend, adding more details to the hull, and starting a blog on papermodelers.com, which I will basically echo here, or vice versa.
As we last left this build… 
Ages of Sail 