On my return from the birthday treat, I have gotten back into a bit more rigging. I am working on the spritsail and finishing the mizzen but in the background, the thought has occurred to me that I do not have too much longer to finish this ship. Obviously, there is still a lot to do and it will take a couple of months, but the end is distantly in sight. So, I thought, "What next???" As it happens, a few years ago during a trip to England (when travel was unencumbered by Covid etc), my wife and I visited HMS Victory in Portsmouth. As my experience in modelling the Vasa has been underpinned by the amount of research and acquired information about the ship (from the Vasamuseet, research papers etc etc), and with the HMS Victory, similar research was existing, and so it seemed like a logical choice.
I think I am reasonably committed now to it's being my next venture and so I started to do some research of the ship and available kits. If you trawl through the various Build Logs with a 'Victory' keyword search there are a huge number of modeller's been down this route. There is also some excellent background research and descriptive build books available. The one thing that stood out as possibly the 'best' and most complete Victory model on offer today, is the Caldercraft (JoTika) HMS Victory, made in Britain but incredibly difficult get get hold of at the moment. Most distributors are out of stock and while this is probably only a temporary thing, at the moment, it is difficult, and expensive - We are talking about a big model and a price tag to match.
One thing however which came out of this research of a new kit that I was not fully aware of, is the marketing and availability of model kit 'copies' or 'knock-offs'. Call me "naive" to the bad ways of the world!! In particular, I became aware of some companies promoting model kits (including the HMS Victory), which are referred to as 'knock-offs' and which clearly are direct copies of existing and well regarded model kit manufacturer's products. This is a huge problem for the model ship manufacturers, to have their design work effectively 'stolen' and then marketed to unsuspecting modellers who are not aware they are buying a considerably cheaper copy of a legitimate ship kit.
Evidence of this practice led me to an especially good article on the NRG (Nautical Research Guild) website here "
https://thenrg.org/resource/articles/anatomy-of-a-knock-off" by Chris Coyle and James Hatch. I would urge all those thinking of purchasing one of these (especially Chinese) kits to read this article - It is most convincing and inarguable as to the piracy that is being committed. In particular, one of the companies named in this article (and there are similar
discussions on MSW, where certain manufacturer kit build logs are banned), was the ZHL model of HMS Victory. It is about half the cost of the Caldercraft model kit and would be very tempting for many modellers.
In my research of the ZHL Model website, interestingly, I was amazed to see that the FIRST thing you see when you open the website, is a US Trade and Patent certificate issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office. If you do a search of the company and registration number, sure enough, this is a valid trademark issued by the US - How can that be when their products are clearly knock-offs??
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Delving further into their website, I was intrigued at one associated article in their Forum which detailed a Build Log of their model of the
Flying Dutchman. This fictitious ship has been modelled and detailed as an available kit but as you go through the Build Log (link is
here). A picture of the hull being built is below. Does this look familiar?????
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On going through the Build Log further, I then found references to the original Vasamuseet Vasa ship plans, and these were shown:
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So the Vasa, has been used as the basis for the design and building of this Flying Dutchman ship. Very interesting. An additional link for this is
here. Note too that (I don't know where in the world), but there is a full size replica of the Flying Dutchman and this is referred to extensively on the website.
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This is all just a NEW and parallel universe to me. It makes for interesting, but almost scary corruption of a seemingly benign hobby industry relating to model ship building!! It is NOT an industry or aspect to the industry which should be sought out or bought from, in my opinion.
Regards,
PeterG
