In my reworking of the Atlantis Black Falcon plastic sailing ship kit, I opted to cut off her shallow hull below the waterline. And, boy, did that work out well!

I chose instead to model the Black Falcon at sea – something dramatic. with all her guns run out. Maybe in action against another ship. But then I’d have to model all the gun crews, and run up against the scale problems that still haunt this ship.

Instead, how about a nice harbor scene, with her boatload of jolly pirates coming back to the ship?

The Black Falcon, as molded by Aurora back in the 1960’s came with a little cockleshell of a boat. That little thing would be scarcely wide enough to seat two sailors.

When I rebuilt the deck, I gave her a very nice, more appropriate grating. There’s a post about how to make the grating.

But what about the boat? That little coracle wouldn’t do. Neither would the beautifully bland boats that came with the Soleil Royale plastic model kit. The longest of those is about half the length of the Black Falcon herself! That little boat just forward of my model is the one that came with the Black Falcon. You can see the scale issue.

I found a very nice boat coaming – the part that makes up the deck and seats – from Airfix’s 1/87 scale HMS Bounty plastic model sailing ship kit, and a dumpy little boat from Lindberg’s Captain Kidd Pirate Ship kit.

I’m telling you, that kit is an old Aurora kit from the early 1960’s, and weirdly scaled like the Black Falcon. She came from a time when model kits were designed to fit into a specific sized box, rather than to a specific scale. But, her boat was nice. And I stole her lanterns, too!

With some careful editing of the coaming, I got it to fit into the boat’s hull. The oars came from Zvezda’s Black Swan plastic model ship kit. The longboat in that kit is a beautiful model with tons of detail, but I chose to cover it with a tarp for the sake of doing things seamanlike.

The crew is a bunch of lead HO scale railroad workers with their legs savagely bent to fit in the boat. They don’t look very good. I’m happy with the chap in the bow. The fellow in the stern was a little HO scale fat guy with shorts and a baseball hat. I filed off the top of his heat and covered it with the sheared-off hat from an Airfix 1/72 soldier from the 30 years war.

In the above picture, when you look at the boat in the upper left and the grating in the lower right, you can see why I chose to model the boat outboard of the ship. When they’ve offloaded that keg and got the crew aboard, they’re going to have a tough time figuring out where to stow the boat!

Tales of the Black Falcon is part of the John D Reinhart content family. Writer, illustrator, videographer, and accidental filmmaker — find the whole story at JohnDReinhart.com.

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