Card Mayflower

Hello all, not doing much at the hobby hobby desk this winter. I did, however, copy this old vintage card model of the Mayflower from Pinterest and printed it on some card stock. It took about an hour to build and doesn't look half bad IMO. Tell me what you think!

Lindberg 1:144 Caravel Pinta

Happy Thanksgiving Holidays to all my Yank friends. I hope you all get to stuff yourselves to your hearts content! I know I plan to.

While completing another home project and starting a new one, I have been taking an hour here and there in the evenings to work on the second of the Lindberg Ships of Columbus pack, the Pinta. This one is also a typical caravel although somewhat larger than the Nina. Again the four cannon with the pack are much too small and the wrong century, so I made four more late 15th century bombards and a couple of small swivel Falconets. Also, like the Nina, I cut the hull to waterline and then finished the bottom and mounted it to the stand so I can set the model on it for full hull display. The gap is a bit distracting but if you don't inspect it to closely, it doesn't look too bad.

Sorry for the poor quality photos. The camera on my J7 Samsung is nowhere near as nice as the one on my old Note.

Happy Halloween 2019

Another Halloween has come and gone and my two artistic girls did their annual Jack a lanterns.
The oldest decided on an Edgar Allan Poe theme this year:

The youngest painted hers:

Halloween has always been a big deal in our family, one of our favorite holidays. My wife always puts up decorations and our girls always dress up. This year the youngest had to work so she missed out. But the oldest was a Viking!

Lindberg 1:144 Caravel Nina

A few years ago my youngest daughter gave me the Lindberg Ships of Columbus pack for Christmas.
I haven't done much in the shop since I retired so I decided to put one of these plastic ships together to see what could be done with it. Like most plastic models from the majors, there are a few historical mistakes and inconsistencies. No one really knows what the Nina looked like. We know it was a typical caravel, but that is all we know. Some paintings and models show Nina as a three masted ship while others have only two masts. Some show all lateen sails, others are square rigged, and a few I have seen are a mix of both lateen and square sails. I would imagine she could be rigged in what ever way best suited the wind at the time. The four cannon that came with the model are the wrong scale and the wrong century. I had to figure out how to make more appropriate breech loaded cannon typical for the end of the 15th century.

My first attempt....not so pretty

I tried wire and thread for the barrel and balsa with sliced sprue for wheels the first go. Not very nice.
I settled on turning some barrels from round toothpicks using a Dremel and small micro file. This worked so well I also turned a small iron breech loading swivel gun.

 Carriages are carved from balsa

 The next two are the waterline model set on the full hull stand for display:

Ares Sails of Glory 1st rate ship Orient

Well it has been seven months since my last post. There have been some major changes in that time. I retired after 41 years of service, the last 21 of those years commuting to Alaska from the Spokane area. I always thought I would have more time to spend on minis and modeling after I retired. It hasn't worked out that way. I am busier now than I have ever been. There are so many things that need doing, things I didn't have time for before when I was gone half the time. And a lot of things did not get done last summer when I was recuperating from a fractured vertebrae. Then there is the living document known as the "Honey-Do List" haha! Actually not a laughing matter. It grows exponentially it seems. I no sooner complete an item on the list and three more appear. My wife is determined not to let me become idle and sedentary in retirement. I have even lost 20 pounds since I quit "working". I used to be able to leave every month for two weeks to rest up. I have discovered when you retire you never get a day off.

Several years ago I modified a couple of Ares' Sails of Glory 1st rate ships for a friend (http://volsminiatures.blogspot.com/2017/05/ares-ottoman-first-rate-bash.html and http://volsminiatures.blogspot.com/2015/01/ares-sails-of-glory-kit-bash.html). He was nice enough to gift me two more 1st rates that had broken masts. They have been sitting on a shelf all this time gathering dust. The one I chose to work on is the Orient 1791 / L'Austerlitz 1808. The masts were removed and the hull was drilled for rigging. Planking seams were carved into the deck. Grating was installed in three places. Skylight painted on the cabin and some color added to the stern and quarter galleries. The masts and top masts were replaced with music wire and the ugly plastic connecting the sails to the plastic masts was removed with a Dremel tool. I also made a sea base to fit the Ares stand for display.