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- Feb 17, 2025
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Hello all from California! My name is Jan. For my 26th birthday I bought the HMS Vanguard Amati 1787 kit off of Facebook Marketplace, having eyed it for several months. I didn't jump on it right away figuring the total market size of this hobby is very small and it wouldn't move quickly.
I have always loved ships of the Age of Sail and have dreamt of building a wooden ship, and so last year I finally took a giant leap and built the Mamoli HMY Mary to see if my patience had evolved to a level I could spend months on a single art project. My eventual goal was a ship of the line, so after that I built the Frigate Hermione (took ~10 months), and a Revell plastic Beagle kit.
This kit is a behemoth. The box weighs more than 30 pounds.
My plan is to build this kit as the HMS Elephant. I adore elephants, and shall try to build this ship so I can display her with an elephant figurehead and varnished wood sides. I don’t see many Elephant build logs on here, or on the internet in general. I trawled Instagram and found one public account with it.
First notes on unboxing and looking a the contents:
I have always loved ships of the Age of Sail and have dreamt of building a wooden ship, and so last year I finally took a giant leap and built the Mamoli HMY Mary to see if my patience had evolved to a level I could spend months on a single art project. My eventual goal was a ship of the line, so after that I built the Frigate Hermione (took ~10 months), and a Revell plastic Beagle kit.
This kit is a behemoth. The box weighs more than 30 pounds.
My plan is to build this kit as the HMS Elephant. I adore elephants, and shall try to build this ship so I can display her with an elephant figurehead and varnished wood sides. I don’t see many Elephant build logs on here, or on the internet in general. I trawled Instagram and found one public account with it.
First notes on unboxing and looking a the contents:
- The kit is gorgeous, the plans themselves are a work of art. I have hung one on my wall. I stashed the ones I don’t need currently in a drawer. There are several smaller boxes containing some resin parts, various railings, anchors, deadeyes, buckets, cannons, false-cannons, carronades, and blocks.
- A fancier kit will come with more fancy parts. I was pleased to see the deadeye chain plates came in photo etch; I had a devil of a time making them on my Frigate. The paper instructions are a nice change from the pdf I had to read from a CD included for the Frigate.
- I don’t think I could take a stab at this without having done a 3 masted ship before. I'm proud of my Frigate and I hope this one turns out even better. The larger size of this ship (over 1 foot longer than the Frigate).
- There are a lot of laser cut parts. The photoetch looks excellent.
- The cannon carriages are cast metal. I've seen others replace these but for now I shall keep them. I might 3D print some extra carronades for the quarterdeck, as HMS Elephant was equipped with these and Amati sells each of them at a criminal price.
- The copper plating will be a first for me, but that will only come many moons from now. It comes as sheets of etched copper that you can snap off in pieces
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