Two well-shaped ship's boats nest together and are stowed over the main hatch, so the out-of-place deck seams are not prominent on the finished model even if the builder does little about them. I have no idea why the mold makers did the hatch that way it almost appears to be an accommodation for replacing batteries but the kit has never been tooled for a motor installation.thank goodness. There is no camber molded into the decks, and there is an oversized opening molded in the lower deck which incorporates the main hatch grating. My best recollection of building this kit when it was new is that some careful fitting was needed to bring all this together, along with the adjoining beakhead bulkhead, when assembling the hull, but the result is very "ship shape". The kit is designed with six stanchions molded to the underside of the upper deck to allow joining the decks before enclosing them with the hull halves, while more stanchions and a galley enclosure are arranged around the large waist opening in the upper deck. A stand and two different name plates are included, neither of them for La Flore.Ī full gun deck is included, with two-part cannon assemblies. The keel is slightly warped on one side, but this doesn't present much of a problem. There is some flash, but not as much as you might expect from molds of this age, and mold parting lines are well aligned. Planking detail is represented by raised lines and what some have described as heavy-handed woodgrain effect, but this will be mellowed some by a coat of paint and can be used to advantage with dry-brushing techniques later on. Parts are molded in brown and tan plastic, with a relatively complete set of vacu-formed sails (no studding sails), flexible black plastic shrouds and a spool of black thread. The general consensus of the participants in the above-mentioned forum (far as I read, anyway), seems to be that the exact design represented by the kit parts is based on a model in a French museum, but that the particular vessel represented by that museum model may never actually have been built and that the actual appearance of "the third La Flore", launched in 1768, may remain unknown.Īll that aside, Lindberg's frigate kit is one of the finest representations of the type in plastic. This French web site introduces possible further confusion by calling la Crenne's frigate the "Flora", which was actually the name of a British frigate scuttled during the American Revolution, raised by the Americans and later sold to France. Bill Morrison posted the text of the original kit history in a forum discussion of the kit, and from the names given there I was able to discover a French language web page regarding the commander of the expedition, Jean-René de Verdun de la Crenne, and an itinerary of the voyage around the North Atlantic from France to the Canaries, Spain, the Caribbean & Denmark. The original potted history included with the 1968 issue of the kit stated that the La Flore participated in a French naval scientific expedition in 1771, but tracking down more particulars on the internet proved difficult due to my foggy forty-something memory of that account. The current issue of this kit is boxed as the "Jolly Roger Pirate Ship" but I deplore this silly marketing ruse and will not use that ridiculous name in referring to this kit again. Of all the plastic sailing ship kits I have built over the years, one of my favorites has always been one that was sold by Lindberg in the late 1960s as the French frigate "La Flore". Lingberg's "Jolly Roger Pirate Ship" By Lars Opland
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