As I had great fun building my first wooden kit, on my next trip to Russia I bought a bunch of other kits from local manufacturers. This modern kit is again from Russian company called Master Korabel (Мастер Корабел), is fully laser-cut and costs less than 10 Euros.
Launch
This is just a general purpose boat used on sail ships in 17th century. Nothing really special about it.
Model quality
Just as with previous kit from this company I had no issues, fit was almost perfect.
Build notes
Initially I thought from the look of it that I can build this kit in one day. Well, I couldn’t be more wrong. It took me full week to build it.
I didn’t experience any problems, if you don’t consider tiny size and thinness of all parts to be a problem. It’s a 1/72 scale and everything is made of wood, so I had to be extra careful to avoid breaking parts.
box content
Because everything is so tiny and fragile you have to build a special internal supporting structure before installing ribs and doing planking.
Interestingly most of the ribs are ‘fake’ and are installed only after planking is done. You can see the holes for them on this photo.
It took a whole evening to complete planking, mostly because planks had to be held in hot water to make them flexible,
and when you glue wet planks with PVA it take quite long to set.
Once planking was complete I sanded the hull, and then removed supporting structure from inside of the boat.
Then all that was left was installing deck parts, assembling rudder with some photo etch parts, and making oars. Kit includes 10 oars while you only need 8, and it appeared to be very thoughtful, as the oars are so thin it’s very hard not to break one.
Conclusion
Again I’m happy with the result. Working with wood is very fun, but in future I’ll try to stick to bigger ships or boats in larger scale. While building a wooden boat in 1/72 is definitely challenging, I feel that bigger scale would have allowed for more details.
Gallery
