Sometimes back in 2001 (somewhere around July or August I think), I came across a LUGNET discussion about set 398, one poster (jokingly) mentioned that he would trade his sister for this set. Well, I have a sister (heh), and I want to see why this set is so special that people would trade their sisters for, or maybe I can get one too. I found the instruction scan here on Brickshelf.

Looks pretty cool for a ship, and a quick glance at the building steps, I noted that most of the parts are regular bricks. Nice. Well, most of them anyway, some parts turn out to be really rare and hard to find, but that's for later. Perhaps I dont have to trade my sister for this if I want one, I think I can reproduce it.

Turns out this takes MUCH longer than I expected, partly because I wasnt really putting a lot of time to it and partly because I am looking for rare parts here and there. It's a bit incomplete still. (color-wise)

Up to this point it's pretty straight forward, look for parts, put them in, and if I cant find the exact parts, put in a few parts to make the shape.

Then it wants a few black macaroni and black fences. oops, i didnt think I have those. but I do have a few white fences and misc colored macaroni bricks. Problem solved, for now.

then I had a hard time finding enough grey 1x1 for the "canons". This is just too amazing, as I always thought I have lots of those. so again, I was trying to substitue with another color.

A few days later I remembered I had bought a mosaic set of random 1x1's just so i can have stockpiles of 1x1s. I dug those out and now have as many 1x1s greys as I want. Well, so far so good. It looked kinda like a ship at least.

The next big one is the hinge pieces, I couldnt find any that looked like what's on the instruction, so I had to make up something. Well, it looked pretty lousy if you ask me.

Fortunately later I obtained the actual piece and got rid of the ugly hack.

And then, onto the next "problem". While building the sail portion of the ship, I ran out of white fences. I had limited number of white fences from the 600 pieces bucket a couple years back, but I dont have enough of them to do both the ship canons and the sail.

Well, since the canon is invisible from outside, I should be able to get by with using something else, as long as the canon stuck out like they should.

They really do not look as bad as I thought it would, and you cant really tell that I wasnt using black fences, or fences at all. Later I obtained some black fences, but given the invisibility of the canon portion, I decided not to "waste" any black fences on it. I did correct the coloring problem of the sail and use the right color later tho.

So that's pretty much completed. I replaced the color mismatch (red hinge) with black hunge later on, will need to take a new picture of it.

Once I get the black macaroni bricks, I can fix the color mismatch (grey) on the ship, I've already obtained the 2x2 inverted roof piece for the ship stand, but it doesnt seem too out of place to use standard 2x2 bricks.

This is a great model, utilized lots of regular bricks instead of special parts.