Shipmodeling and Blogging Withdrawls

After announcing my brief blog hiatus a little over a week ago, you might have noticed I’m still blogging. Well, it’s turned out that blogging is a good distraction from family health matters, so here I am writing again. In addition to needing to do a bit of blogging, I’m really finding myself going through some ship modeling withdrawals as well. Now, I don’t have a whole lot of time and space to be working on much, so I mostly think about ship modeling. But, I decided to go ahead and have the good folks at Ages of Sail send me a paper model kit.

Paper model kits require a minimum of tools, result in less mess than wooden ship models, and  the kits are very inexpensive. Perusing the Ages of Sail site was a fun distraction, but I finally settled on Shipyard’s paper kit number MK010, the Dutch fluit Schwartzer Rabe. The ship is a 3-masted armed cargo ship carrying 10 guns. The kit, like just about all of Shipyard’s paper kit series ships (the MK series) is 1/96-scale and this model will measure about 40.5cm or just about 16″ long when complete.

I chose this kit because it’s interesting and different. To be honest, I really wanted to get the Papegojan, which is a similar type of ship, as I’ve actually been eyeing the larger laser-cut card model. But, someone in my ship model club is building it, and I think it would be nice to work on something a little different from his.

The kit should arrive tomorrow, so I’ll post more about it after it arrives. However, I will mention that the Polish card model company GPM has a detail set available for this kit, which provides more laser-cut parts to make the paper model look nicer. I will probably be ordering that shortly. The extra parts shouldn’t be needed until later in the build, so the time it takes to get the set shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

OcCre Part Kits

So, you might think that getting the paper kit and ordering the detail set would be enough to overcome my shipmodeling withdrawals, but no. One of the things I’ve been thinking about for a long time, aside from the thought that I’ve got too many unfinished projects on-hand, is that some of those bigger kits of Spanish warships from the Spanish kit manufacturer OcCre are pretty cool.

Over the last year or so, I’ve taken a liking to the late 18th century Spanish warships. I particularly love the way the Spanish named some of their ships, and the way those names roll of the tongue in Spanish. Names like the Neustra Señiora de las Mercedes. Now, this kits are kind of pricey when purchased from US dealers and I’m not really sure why. It’s possible to order them from overseas, but the cost of the kit, plus shipping, is really more than I want to spend, so I started thinking about Part Kits or Packs, as OcCre likes to call them.

OcCre has four kits that can be purchased over 6 sets. The kits are the Santissima Trinidad, the San Ildefonso, the Nuestra Señiora del Pilar, and the Montañes. I know that in the long run, these kits cost more this way due to the extra shipping and the premium that the company charges for offering the kits in parts. But, I thought it might be fun to try.

Now, I actually looked at some of the de Agostini / Model-Space subscriptions, but those cost even more, and when I looked recently, most of the subscriptions were marked out of stock. So, I went with an OcCre kit. The model kit is the Montañes, a Spanish 3rd rate ship of the line, which is probably the one Spanish ship that has a short and less interesting name, but I like the ship, and she survived Trafalgar.

OcCre’s 1/70-scale 74-gun third rate ship of the line, Montañes

Anyway, I’m very interested in learning how these part kits work out. I’ll definitely be posting more about it in the very near future. So, if you’re interested in OcCre’s part kits and the experience of ordering and receiving them, stay tuned.  Ω