Those of you who have been building models long enough should recognize this company. While they’re primarily in the railroad model aftermarket business, they make a few products that many ship modelers have used including the well-known ‘Chopper’ products. The owner recently announced that for personal reasons, the company will cease operations on August 30, 2019.

There is always the chance that someone out there will buy the company. But with the kind of products including gear pullers, arbor press, detail sander, brass bending press, and specialty tools for railroad models, it would take someone with skill and knowhow to keep the product line going.

Of course, we’ll see second hand products on Ebay and at our local ship modeling clubs for quite some time. But, it is always sad to see a hobby industry fixture like NWSL go.

For now, the company is still in operation, so if you are…

Preparing the Blocks

At some point, we’re going to need to deal with one of the small details, namely the blocks. Billing Boats commonly includes pre-molded plastic block in many of their kits. I think they may use small wooden blocks for some things, but the blocks on this 1:60-scale kit come in plastic.

Now, you may not like plastic blocks and may want to substitute some 3rd party fittings instead.  The blocks in the kit are 3/16″ or 5mm single-sheave blocks. Amati makes 5mm single blocks in Walnut and you can find them at Ages of Sail here, at $2 for a pack of 20. Unfortunately, shipping far outweighs the cost of the blocks themselves. Not a problem if you’re already planning to order other things. But, personally, even though I have many choices of blocks on-hand, I just decided to try out the ones in the kit.

The Prop

After painting the hull and adding the prop, I went ahead and decided that I didn’t like the position of the prop. Now, you may not care enough about it to want to change anything, but it was bugging me. Now, I may be wrong, but I’m glad I made the changes.

The prop points downward. On a real boat, this would drive the bow downwards, which may be the whole point. The boat may be more stable, operating with the bow not riding up above the water. But, the images of the completed model don’t seem to have the prop pointing down quite so much.

The main issue here is really that the shape of the rudder assembly prevents you from mounting the prop in a “nicer” fashion – the top of the prop hits the wooden frame. Really, all you need to do here is shave…

In the last year or so, I’ve been working a lot on some wasen model scratch builds. There are the Hozugawa Ayubune, the Urayasu Bekabune, and others. In the meantime, my pile of Woody Joe kits keeps growing. So, I decided it’s time to get another one of these kits done. Luckily, Woody Joe kits are relatively quick builds.

The Kitamaebune or Kitamaesen kit is listed by Woody Joe as taking about 70 hours to build. Compare that to their more complex Higakikaisen kit, which takes about 50% longer to build. I spent about 3 months on that kit.

The Kitamaebune seems like it will take considerably less time to build the basic kit. But, this is the first bezaisen I’ve built since visiting Japan in 2016. There are a lot of details I managed to see up close on the Hakusan Maru, the bezaisen replica on Sado Island. So…

Just saw this beautifully done build of Artesania Latina’s Pen Duick kit built by Model Shipworld Member “Reci”.

Photo from The Nautical Research Guild’s MSW.

The Pen Duick is a cutter-rigged racing sailboat built in 1898 and still participates in races today. There’s a nice photo of the deck on the Wikipedia entry…

You can follow along on the build of this model on Model Shipworld here: https://modelshipworld.com/index.php?/topic/19179-pen-duick-by-reci-finished-artesania-latina-128/&

The build log is not long, but it’s full of photos showing some nice step-by-step detail of construction.

The kit is manufactured by Artesania Latina, which is a classic and relatively inexpensive brand, and generally easy to find. The kit is a 1/28-scale plank-on-bulkhead wooden model and measures just over 29″ long and about 24″ high.

Artesania Latina produces quality kits and many, like this, feature laser-cut wooden structural parts, quality woods, brass, and cast metal fittings, rigging line, sail…