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Royal Louis - Mamoli

Ken

Ken

Joined
Dec 16, 2016
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Here goes, this is the start of my build log of the Royal Louis 120 gun ship of the line in 1:90 scale, this is a kit from the late Mamoli company.

Due to issues it’s nearly two years since I stopped modelling, my wife bought me this kit for Xmas in an attempt to get me started again. She succeeded as I started the build on Boxing Day.

The Kit. It was bought from Ebay and I believe that it is at least twenty years old. It was complete and in perfect condition, like new with no warped sheets and all the strip wood was surprisingly good.

There are six different types of strip wood in various colours and certainly plenty of it, enough for the many re-does that I’m sure I’ll be needing to do. There is a large amount of cast parts, mostly good and plenty of the usual kit supplied stuff. The plans are excellent, plenty of them and well detailed, three being 1:1 scale sheets much better than the new trend of online guides. The instructions are acceptable/good. ( Italian translated ) but appear very useable.

As I mentioned, I started about six weeks ago and I’ve made quite a bit of progress so initially my log will be trying to catch up with the current state of the build. I’ll do the log as if I’m doing it in real time, mistakes and all, it took some time to get my head around building again so there’s plenty of them. As usual I’ll be building only with parts supplied with the kit, this is my normal way as historical accuracy is not my thing, I just enjoy the build.

I’m a bit nervous about the small 1:90 scale, especially with the smaller parts as I have issues with my hands and have very recently had intrusive surgery which has left my left arm looking like it was bitten by a shark leaving little feeling at the moment, but recovering so please give me some slack.


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Hi Ken,

It's still a big model at over 1 metre in length! Sometimes a smaller scale is better because mistakes tend to "disappear" as they get smaller! Look forward to following the build. I still haven't finished reading through your retro log on the Prince William yet!

All the best
 
DomCee said:
Hi Ken,

It's still a big model at over 1 metre in length! Sometimes a smaller scale is better because mistakes tend to "disappear" as they get smaller! Look forward to following the build. I still haven't finished reading through your retro log on the Prince William yet!

All the best
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Hi Dom, Thanks for coming aboard. I agree with you about the smaller scale, my issue is being able to handle the tiny blocks. No fully rigged cannons on this build I'm afraid.
 
Now for the start of the build. Remember that I am some way into the build so initially this is a catch up account, many of the initial mistakes that you’ll see have been corrected and even a major re-do was undertaken.

First I made up a simple but very effective support for the keel, from an old chipboard shelf and some angle brackets, no expense spared!

The keel and bulkheads are made up from good 5mm ply, the keel even though quite old was still very true. These parts were not in sheets but had been cut out by hand and shrink wrapped seperatly, thankfully no hated char to remove. They had been cut accurately nowhere was more than .5mm out, I checked them against the plans and adjusted where needed before assembly. The keel came in three parts, after joining and reinforcing the joints I placed it in the support and fitted the bulkheads adjusting their depth so that the deck would be even, no packing was needed. There were twenty bulkheads, much more than usual in a kit so good for strength, but the smaller spacing made it awkward getting squares between them to set them straight. You'll notice slots cut into the bulkhead edges, these are for cast gun ports to be added later. To strengthen the structure more two 10mm beams were installed the full length of the hull. To finish I dry fitted the ply deck to check the fit.

So far I was very pleased with the quality and fit. As for size I saw that the hull was only two inches shorter than the Mantua Sovereign of the Seas which is in itself quite a large model.



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Hello and thanks for visiting my build and for the likes given. This is still catching up to the current state of the build. It shows the planking of the main deck, the deck beams and the stern gun ports.

The deck planking was made up using .5 x 4mm I think a dark sappelle which I fixed in place with white glue after darkening their edges. The nail marks were made with pencil, at this scale I thought dowels would be out of scale. I didn’t plank the entire deck but only the area that would be visible so as to be economical with the supplied planks. Many kits are not very generous with these planks and I didn’t want to run short, with the age of the kit they would have been difficult to match. I later realized that this hadn’t been necessary as even with mistakes there would have been more than enough to have fully planked the deck.

Next was to make up the stern gun ports. One of the features of this kit is the use of cast gun ports that you fit prior to planking. There’s about a hundred of these and as I’ve shown they were poorly caste and difficult to get them to fit and look good, they were also not suited to have recessed ports for the lids to sit into. I decided to build in my own version which would look better. After fitting, painting and planking I thought that I’d made the right decision. I then fitted the deck beams and upright pillars, a template was provided to get the correct curvature of the above deck. The basic part of the build was coming along nicely.


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Ken said:
Hello and thanks for visiting my build and for the likes given. This is still catching up to the current state of the build. It shows the planking of the main deck, the deck beams and the stern gun ports.

The deck planking was made up using .5 x 4mm I think a dark sappelle which I fixed in place with white glue after darkening their edges. The nail marks were made with pencil, at this scale I thought dowels would be out of scale. I didn’t plank the entire deck but only the area that would be visible so as to be economical with the supplied planks. Many kits are not very generous with these planks and I didn’t want to run short, with the age of the kit they would have been difficult to match. I later realized that this hadn’t been necessary as even with mistakes there would have been more than enough to have fully planked the deck.

Next was to make up the stern gun ports. To One of the features of this kit is the use of cast gun ports that you fit prior to planking. There’s about a hundred of these and as I’ve shown they were poorly caste and difficult to get them to fit and look good, they were also not suited to have recessed ports for the lids to sit into. I decided to build in my own version which would look better. After fitting, painting and planking I thought that I’d made the right decision. I then fitted the deck beams and upright pillars, a template was provided to get the correct curvature of the above deck. The basic part of the build was coming along nicely.


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Hi Ken, looking good so far. Quality is always a problem with some kits and I often take one look at the fittings, bin them and then make something that is much better. It's annoying because you have paid for those parts but you will only regret fitting them later on when they don't "look right" on the model. It takes extra time, but then it's more satisfying when you have done a better job than the kit manufacturer!
 
Ken said:
Hello and thanks for visiting my build and for the likes given. This is still catching up to the current state of the build. It shows the planking of the main deck, the deck beams and the stern gun ports.

The deck planking was made up using .5 x 4mm I think a dark sappelle which I fixed in place with white glue after darkening their edges. The nail marks were made with pencil, at this scale I thought dowels would be out of scale. I didn’t plank the entire deck but only the area that would be visible so as to be economical with the supplied planks. Many kits are not very generous with these planks and I didn’t want to run short, with the age of the kit they would have been difficult to match. I later realized that this hadn’t been necessary as even with mistakes there would have been more than enough to have fully planked the deck.

Next was to make up the stern gun ports. One of the features of this kit is the use of cast gun ports that you fit prior to planking. There’s about a hundred of these and as I’ve shown they were poorly caste and difficult to get them to fit and look good, they were also not suited to have recessed ports for the lids to sit into. I decided to build in my own version which would look better. After fitting, painting and planking I thought that I’d made the right decision. I then fitted the deck beams and upright pillars, a template was provided to get the correct curvature of the above deck. The basic part of the build was coming along nicely.


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Hi Ken,

You're not the only one who rations plank wood from a kit. On my first build, I had 1/3 of a strip left when finished! Glad you went with scratch building gunport frames from sticks. The cast ones really are not good. I wish there was an easy way to replace the gallery castings also. They are overly thick for the scale, and with a little more effort, yours will look much better. Castings tend to be blobby and line on them that are supposed to be straight rarely are, and they are overly thick on the finer details. I'm very excited to see your build coming along. This is one beautiful ship.
 
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DARIVS ARCHITECTVS said:
Hi Ken,

You're not the only one who rations plank wood from a kit. On my first build, I had 1/3 of a strip left when finished! Glad you went with scratch building gunport frames from sticks. The cast ones really are not good. I wish there was an easy way to replace the gallery castings also. They are overly thick for the scale, and with a little more effort, yours will look much better. Castings tend to be blobby and line on them that are supposed to be straight rarely are, and they are overly thick on the finer details. I'm very excited to see your build coming along. This is one beautiful ship.
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Hi Kurt, Thanks, you made very relevant comments and I completely agree with you. You will see in my catch up logs to come that I initially used these cast ports in the hull but wasn’t overly happy with the result. I started over and scratch built them. They now look much better, the only trouble is there’s so many of them.
 
Ken said:
Hi Kurt, Thanks, you made very relevant comments and I completely agree with you. You will see in my catch up logs to come that I initially used these cast ports in the hull but wasn’t overly happy with the result. I started over and scratch built them. They now look much better, the only trouble is there’s so many of them.
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Yeah. Lots of them. It's like ratlining or rigging cannon carriage gun tackles on a 100 gun ship. SO MANY.
 
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Good morning. Just another quick catch up post today.

I was quite disappointed with the cast ports supplied, many weren’t properly formed and the amount of flash was beyond acceptable. However as this was the prescribed method for the build I decided to go ahead and use them. I spent several hours cleaning up the flash just to get them to fit correctly. There were two types, open ones for the upper decks and angled ones with a backing for the main gun decks. The angle ones protruded out quite a bit to account for the hull curvature and would need extensive filing to bring them back inline with the planking. After fitting you can see that they don’t all sit at the same angle or depth and even a small variation in height showed up when viewed along the hulls length, I had to take several out and altered their slots a few times until they looked about right. It would have been necessary to fit the first planking between the ports butting up against them, not ideal for a smooth hull. Not wanting to deviate from the plan I foolishly went ahead anyway, I later regretted this decision, you will see my change of tack in a later post.

I made up, painted and fitted a small cabin, fitted and planked the next deck making quite a rookie error causing more corrective work later.

I also added reinforcements to the keel where I intend to fit mounting rods for a display base.


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I know you're not planning on using the metal gunports, but photos of them have confused me on one point. Were the planks for the firts layer supposed to terminate at the side walls of the gunport fittings or strips laid over the ports, with holes cut into the planks later, according to the instructions? Working around the edges of the gunports with segments of planking strip[s looks like a major pain, and would result in uneven hull surfaces.

To replace the metal gun ports, black-painted blocks of wood can be glued to the sides of the frames to accept the half-barrels of the cannons. These blocks would of course be recessed away from the inside surface of the hull planking.

As you add planks to the hull, the location of gunports will need to be carefully marked so you cut the holes in the correct locations.
 
Hi Kurt. You’ve arrived at the same conclusion that I came to. The first planking would terminated at the edge of each gun port, when completed you were supposed to file down the cast port to be level with the planking. There would be little support for that initial planking and an even flow of the planks would be difficult to achieve. As you suggested I ended up putting blocks where the half barrels would fit, planked normally, marked and cut out the ports as would be normal practice. I should have backed my feeling about this and saved quite a bit of time and effort, you will see all this in my catch up posts.
 
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