USS Constitution

Though sails seem very faux but what can you do ? but model is color cast dark brown to save excessive painting and comes with thread!

This is a pretty fun build. The rigging in particular is a good challenge, but certainly doable. One thing to watch for is a bow in the masts, in my kit the mizzen mast was slightly bowed, but by making the rigging on one side tighter than the other I was able to compensate. The shrouds also don't always line up as they should, but you won't know this until you go to attach the yard arms to the mast. Might be best to look ahead to the yard attachment steps to make sure your shrouds aren't obstructing the attachment points of the yards. These are easy issues to work around though, and the model looks great.

This was Revell's first ship model, and while pretty innovative for the time (1950's), it hasn't aged very well. Fit is better than you'd expect for such an old kit, but it has multiple visible ejector pin marks on every piece, and so much flashing that it's hard to tell what were supposed to be real pins and tabs. It comes with thread and vacuform sails (people complain they look fake: just use a little CreateFX oak brown wash to give them a weathered, life-like look). The end result looks really nice, hence the 3-stars, but I didn't really enjoy the build, and would recommend going with newer tooling if you're interested in a Constitution model.