Black Seas Critique Continued

The plastic sprues come with three different generic sterns and three different stems with figurehead.

Since this is supposed to be the US fleet, there is also a bag with three named sterns: Chesapeake, Constellation and Congress; and four specific metal figurehead stems.

As I said in the last post, they got the figurehead for the Chesapeake right, a winged angel with left arm draped over exposed right breast. I haven't researched enouh of the other two ships to know what they got right or wrong yet, except the Constellation stern. The rounded stern they provide is the 1853 stern from the sloop Constellation. Rounded sterns weren't developed during the Napoleonic period. So the stern Warlord provides for the USS Constellation is out of period with the other ships in the pack. And I am at a loss why there are four stems for 3 ships.

The next thing I want to complain about is that Warlord cast the spars flush with the masts!

Spars set in front of the mast, always! The way they are cast the ships can only be modelled with a following wind from directly astern. A very inefficient sailing configuration. And by casting the spars flush, they can't even be separated and repositioned on the mast without destroying either the spars or the masts.

The next thing I don't care for is the paper backed clear acetate ratlines. You just can't get rid of the glare, shine and reflection on them.

So I have been experimenting with jigs to make ratlines for the frigate. I came up with two jigs. The first one I made can produce the whole lower mast ratline set at one time. But this proved time consuming and difficult to thread.

I used these for the lower masts.

The second jig I made is much simpler and faster to thread, but only does one ratline set at a time.

After mounting the ratlines I worked the rest of the standing rigging.

While doing so I discovered the predrilled holes for the formast, mainmast and mizzenmast stays are too far forward, just inside the aft end of the chains/channels so the stays don't show behind the ratlines. I will be drilling new holes farther aft on the remaining ships.

Also something to note: There are two resin 44 gun large frigate packs in the box, the USS President and USS United States. All of the Humphreys frigates had flush single gun decks. The exception was United States which had a notorious aft block house. This block house was blamed for her being such a poor sailer. The United States resin model has a raised poop deck, not a block house.

It is also interesting that the only boat davits in the squadron box were on the sprue in the United States bag. They don't fit on the quarters of this model because of the raised poop deck. But they fit perfectly on the quarters of the flush decked President.

All US frigates carried quarter and stern boat davits. Since there were none on the plastic frigate sprues, I made davits for the frigate which can be seen in the photos above.

While I may be whining alot, overall I am enjoying the challenges to make a decent model with this first ship. As I work through it, ideas for modifying the next one come to mind and I know I should write them down because I'm old and might forget! And there are all of those extra stems and sterns........hmmm