Ship Modeling

I got into ship modeling during the war, when model warships were a big thing.  These were wood kits, mostly Strombecker, though I think I did do one Monogram model.  Later, when I was in my early teens, I wanted to do a sailing ship model.  There were as yet no plastic kits, so like the other genres of modeling, my first sailing ship was wood.  I remember it was a Revenue Cutter, and though Sterling kits were big at the time, my memory says it was a Guillows.  I can find no references now, however, that Guillows actually offered sailing ship kits.

I built several wood ship models before trying my hand it scatch ship modeling.  This was during my sophmore year in college.  The library there had a very old book on spars and masts of British ships of the line.  I used some of this info to scatch a small SOL, about a fourth rate.  This was not a specific ship, but representative of a late 18th century ship.  It was plank on bulkhead, all from balsa wood.  Since I then and still paint sailing ships if the prototype were painted, I found balsa works fine for a POB model.

Having spent much of my life around the Great Lakes, I have always been fascinated by lakers.  I built a 40s vintage laker in about 1970.  Since then I have tried to model the history of lakers, from an early steam lumber hooker to the Edmond Fitzgerald.  I have plans for two left to do, a modern thousand footer and a lumber schooner.  I use A.J. Fisher plans and fittings for my great lakes ships.
 
 

Current projects- I will use this spot to show projects I am currently working on.  No promises on how up-to-date these are, but that is the intent, anyway.  My main project right now is a model ship, a Mantua kit, a French ship of the line, le Superbe.

I had problems building this as the hull planking is Walnut, and I seem to have developed an allergy to walnut sawdust.  To finish sanding the hull, I had to use a respirator!  I got a primer coat on as soon as possible while I fill and finish the hull exterior.  The tan paint that I am using for primer is just regular acrylic enamel, but it is not too far off one of the main colors to be used on the hull.  I have determined from my research that le Superbe was in all likihood coppered, so the bottom will be coppered from the mail wale on down.
 

I tend to specialize in lakers. Here is one of my lakers which ran as a construction article in Ships in Scale.

Here are two more lakers.  The one in the foreground is a whaleback, built by famed builder Alexander McDougal in Superior, Wisconsin.  This model was also a multi-part project in Ships in Scale.  The background model is the Strathcona, a typical laker of the 1940s.  This is the type of laker I used to see so often navigating the Detroit river, either upbound or downbound.

Not all my ship modeling involves lakers.  I love the whole era of the transition from sail to steam, basically the second half of the Nineteenth Century. I did a model of the U.S.S. Cairo, which got a cover shot in Ships in Scale. This model no longer really fits into my collection, and I would like to find some museum with interest in Civil War in the west, to which I could donate the model.

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