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Reviews (17)
Nov 20, 2018
suspected factory rejects
Problem with both items - suspected 'factory rejects' - the closing tab has a slot to engage with a small protruding lip on the box to hold it shut. Except - it didn't (have a slot - it was blocked!) and so it didn't (lock closed).
Sep 25, 2016
Medium Skill level; Fun project; some tips and comments
4 of 4 found this helpful LINDBERG Jolly Roger Pirate Ship Kit 70874 Review
Ahoy, mateys! Some people write poor reviews having probably expected an easy ride with this kit (which I’d say requires a moderate skill level). I hope mine won’t come across as being too negative; I just want to give a few ‘warnings’, but overall it was fun to get into such a kit again after many decades of abstinence!
1) The kit itself was good quality, good detail parts with minimal excess bits (I lack the correct technical term) to trim away. All parts were accounted for, and no reference in instructions to parts that didn’t exist. It’s true some part numbers can be small and difficult to read, but in the end I identified all parts.
2) Best Tip: Before starting, go online to seek out webpages by people who have built this kit, they have some great ideas, tips, and some alternative building sequences which I wish I’d known about beforehand. Knowing no better, I followed the instructions assuming they would be the most logical way to go, but gradually realizing (perhaps this applies to most plastic kits?) it’s not usually the case. A good example is:
3) Cannons: Their position is set by holes in the deck. I spent a long time meticulously painting each individual carriage (even the tiny ‘wheels’ another color) before sadly learning they subsequently disappear under an upper deck and behind the hull walls so you barely see them! The barrels don’t all line up centrally within their portholes when you assemble the decks and hull halves: I suggest leave them all off until much later, inserting them from the outside, so you can more accurately place them. It’s also easier to handle the hull, while working on other parts of the ship, without breaking off the protruding barrels.
4) The instructions gradually get ‘worse’ as you go along, some pictures are dark (photocopy quality) so miss important detail, then when you refer to the picture on the box you realize discrepancies. The same applies to color scheme: they advise some parts colors but not all, then again the box picture differs. I advise you make up your own mind early on regarding your own color scheme. I painted the capstan red as instructed, but it just isn’t right. So I rebelled over a white main hull with red upper!
5) Ratlines: Beware where these fix to the sides of the hull - hold back on gluing the 'shelves' (I forget their proper name) to the hull sides until ready to add ratlines that weave into them - ensure you choose the right 'shelf' to suit the ratlines (left and right sides differ) and make sure the ratlines are not dangled in front of cannon/portholes. (Guess how I discovered this...).
6) Sails: worth a mention: Serious hobbyists make their own with ‘see-through’ linen but I was happy with the opaque plastic ones provided; they don’t look right in plain white as provided so I used some white paint (from a 5-gallon drum of interior latex enamel, the only white paint I had handy!) mixed with a little yellow for a light cream, watered down. As it dried the colors separated out and looked patchy – and perfect! No skill, just plain luck! But another tip, which is hard to explain: when gluing the sails to their yardarms, do so with the yardarm already clipped in place on its mast, and hold the sail away from the mast (as if being blown forward by the wind). Tricky I know. I just glued them while lying down on the table and so at the ‘wrong angle’, so when installed, they ‘hang back’ against the mast. When you later apply rigging, the sail is ‘in the wrong place’, I had to cheat and add horizontal spars behind the sails to ‘push them out away from the masts’ to look as if blown out by the wind.
7) Rigging. This is the last and hardest part of all. Apart from being fiddly and time-consuming (all part of the fun) the diagram they provide is hard to understand and I gave up. Again it also disagreed with the box picture. I researched various pictures online and learned there’s no one way of doing it (a real ship’s rigging can differ from one year to the next), so just apply logic, do it your own way and it will be OK! I thought the red twine provided was too gaudy; I could have gone for realistic beige but it ‘disappeared’ against many backgrounds, so I went for unrealistic but more visually effective black.
Sorry for the long waffle but hope it helps.
Aug 06, 2019
surprisingly smaller than expected yet just as powerful
Being an old guy, I was impressed how SMALL this cute drill is, compared with my old 'regular size' one was (before I dropped and broke it!) And yet it seems just as powerful. Sure it's cheap and simple, and you need to treat it with some care, but I'm happy it does the job.