- Wooden Ship Model Kits - Chinese RED Boat Precise

This is a low cost kit. The wood is thin, but the laser cutting is superb. I had fun with this one. The vertical panels have very fine laser engraving. To avoid hiding or filling this in with paint I used red acrylic ink. Did the hull in dark greed, the top edges and run rails in gold, the dividing panels in gold, and the deck and top roof panels in a thinned lacquer. The guys in my model boat group loved the colors and were quite impressed by the detail on such a low cost kit. If you've just finished a multi month or year complicated build and the idea of doing another 3+ mast vessel with all that rigging makes you hesitate, snag one of these and let your imagination run wild. Bought it and another form the same vendor on a whim, glad I did. Sometimes it's nice to make complete an unusual model that is small scale in less than a month and not have to take it all so seriously! The directions are basically non existent, but the blurry kinda-sorta photocopy single sheet and some head scratching will let you get it all sorted out. I have to do 5 stars based on the fun per dollar on this one.

This is the second model I have put together from this company. The kit is well made and easy to assemble with very little need to work the parts.

Not worth the money

This is actually Red (or South Lake) Boat number two. Number one was assembled and it is nice enough but it's tiny. Too small to accurately include the details I wanted to include. So I haven't actually assembled this model so much as use it as a source of patterns. I used it's pieces and a panto-graph to triple the sizes of the pieces. I cut (band-saws and scroll-saws are your friends...) frames and structural parts out of 1/8 basswood (ply) and cut sides and walls from door-skin (ply). Cabin tops are chopped-down/out of a old woven bamboo place-mat that didn't run fast enough. Mooring poles are a pair of ancient bamboo chopsticks that appeared from somewhere and the windows are yellowed (from age) clear 1/32 acetate. Instructions? I don't read Chinese, simplified or not, and most of the time there's dang little detail in the drawings. Can it be assembled? You bet. Is it easy to assemble? Depends on the amount of work you put into it. Quick and dirty will look quick and dirty. Will it mostly look like the pictures? Yeppers. (at least with this one you're not dealing with wildly out of scale sail patterns [green eyebrows]...)

Poor instructions

Nice model, but the instructions were fairly bad and poorly illustrated. Also ended up with a mystery piece of no apparent use. It does, however, look good.