And so, the entire population of 9th Century Tromso puts to sea. Was Tromso around in the 9th Century? I honestly don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised.
This is, of course, the Emhar 1/72nd scale Gokstad Viking longship, with the additional Emhar Viking ship crew. It was actually a fun kit to assemble, and I thought it offered good fit and good engraved detail. The figurehead is especially nice, but I didn't capture it close-up in any photographs. I generally find ships fiddly and hard to build, and sailing ships especially so, but as sailing ships go, this one was actually pretty easy. Not a whole lot of rigging and no ratlines, which usually drive me to fits of screaming madness.
But the lack of rigging was offset by the plentitude of crew. I count 34 crewmen (one oarsman had to be deleted because the unusual yard arrangement was in the way), and 34 Vikings is a heap of painting for someone who doesn't consider himself to be a figure painter. I don't know that Vikings were really this colorful - sources appear to disagree, and a whole load of guys wearing brown in a brown ship would have produced a sort of brown hole, if you will, that would capture color and prevent it from escaping.
The Emhar figures are made out of some kind of plastic that is softer and more flexible than styrene, but harder and more poseable than polyethylene. The mold parting lines tedious to clean up, but the poseable nature of the figures made it somewhat easier to match them to the angles of the oars than I had feared. I only broke the arm off one Viking while posing him, and was able to adjust their arms a bit after they were painted without losing too much paint, so on the whole, I think I approve of this new Emhar mystery plastic.
The sail was a very shiny and smooth vacuum-formed thing. I painted it by hand, without too much regard for coverage or straightness of line, theorizing that a real sail would look pretty sad after a few days at sea anyway. To produce a halfway realistic "billow" in the sail I had to drill a small and highly ahistorical hole in the bottom of the sail and tie it to the figurehead with a piece of fishing line, which is painfully obvious in the bottom picture. Eventually I'm going to replace it with something finer and less noticeable, but I have a lot of "eventually" tasks that I never seem to get to.
All in all, yeah, Vikings. It's cool!
PS: The odd board-like oddment is their gangplank, I believe, and I stowed it on the raised oar storage trees even though I'm not sure that would have been actual Viking practice.
PPS: I painted and am in the process of weathering the overlapped shields that the kit supplied. I may or may not install them. The instructions say that the shields were only overlapped along the wales when the oars were shipped, but I've seen models (by better modelers than me) that show them both ways. We'll see.
2 comments:
Hi,
Do you have any idea where I can buy Viking oarsmen at 1:50 size please.
You've certainly done an excellent job with the kit. I've just finished mine, and there are a number of things I've found extremely frustrating about it, mainly to do with the instruction sheet, which is less than helpful. There are a number of things one needs to do before assembling the hull and deck plates, namely, drilling the two holes through the strakes on each side to take the shrouds, and gluing the three cleats on each side for the running rigging. I'd also advise actually gluing the spar into place before stepping the mast - don't simply tie it there like the instructions suggest. I assembled my kit with the shields on the sides and the oars shipped and stowed on the deck. Doing this makes the hawse holes in the side for rigging to pass through inaccessible, which again is frustrating - ideally I would have constructed a shield rack, but that would have required hours of research and propably would have been incredibly fiddly.
I refuse to believe that Viking seafarers would have been so careless as to have 32 oars rolling unsecured on a possibly pitching deck, so I lashed each bundle of oars with a piece of thread, to keep them tidy. My kit came without figures, and I've been unable to find them for love nor money, so my kit is devoid of people, but it is what it is. Finally despite my best efforts - or perhaps because of them - the sail just doesn't look right.
One last point - the anchor in my kit is huge - the stock is probably 10 or 11 scale feet long, and the flukes protrude a good three or four feet on each side. As the anchor of the real Gokstad ship did not survive, I basically jettisoned it.
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