The September/October issue of Ships in Scale is here, and the cover is a stop-the-scroll: Tomasz Kłyszyński’s 1:33 German shrimp cutter CUX 87 at golden hour on the Baltic, green trawl nets in the last of the light. It is a radio-control build log with a childhood behind it, and it is the right image for this issue.
The one thing we want you to open first, besides the issue itself, is the kit survey dashboard: https://shipsinscale.com/kit-survey/. One hundred and three readers rated the manufacturers they have actually built. You can sort the fleet, see where ratings split across materials, instructions, parts fit, accuracy, value, and availability, and read what people would change.
What holds the pages together is the work that happens before the first plank goes down. Plans. Instructions. The drawing that never got made. That is the thread running from the kit survey through McLaughlan’s case studies and Richard’s look at the ships that never became kits.
The kit survey dashboard
Kit Survey / Between the Lines is the house report in print. The live dashboard is the public version of that work: overall rating ranked, category breakdowns, who answered, and how they buy. It is already up at shipsinscale.com/kit-survey.
The cover story
CUX 87, Part 1, is Tomasz Kłyszyński’s 1:33 shrimp cutter for radio control: a laser-cut hull, a mahogany-clad wheelhouse, and those green trawl nets. He is building toward a Baltic childhood. Part 1 gets the boat on the water. The photograph on the cover is his.
Builds on the bench
James Norton’s Galway Hooker, Part II, brings the 1/32 scratch-built leathbhád home: turf cargo, a figure of his father, hand-made red sails, and a finished case. George Athanasiou continues HMS Beagle with Part III, a careful method for setting up deadeyes so they sit level. Linus Spjutsberg’s Napoleonic warships, Part 3, takes 1/700 ships of the line through sea bases, photography, and the history that makes a palm-sized hull worth the trouble. The Hood series continues with Monster in the Box, Part 3, still in steel-navy waters.
Glynn Guest has a guest feature in this issue as well.
History that has to be drawn first
Ian McLaughlan’s Minor Warships 5 is two seventeenth-century case studies: the Truelove, built from Deane and the record, and the Pepysian sloop Bonetta, recovered from van de Velde drawings and hard choices about stem and stern. Richard’s Why History Loses to Legend asks why ships of real importance, the Centurion among them, never became kits, and what actually decides which hulls get tooled.
Technique
David Antscherl is back with Silver Soldering, Part 2, a how-to for more complex assemblies. Tim Mayer’s Buoys piece is On the Water in spirit: homemade cans and nuns that find the bottom themselves, built for an RC course. Both are steal-this-afternoon articles.
In the back of the book
Reader’s Showcase includes Patrick’s photographs and the Duchess of Kingston. As always, we are glad to have them in print, and we will not lift those images onto the socials.
Print copies should mail in about a week. The digital issue is live now. Open the kit survey dashboard first if you want the numbers, then read the issue at https://shipsinscale.com.
