1/1200 Scale Card Sloop

Two years ago this month I wrote a post about Jeff Knutsen's 1/300 scale 10 gun sloop which I thought ended up quite presentable. Today I finished another one. Only this one is 1/1200 scale! And it came out very nice! It fits in nicely with my metal 1/1200 fleets. Jeff says on his War Artisan website that this freebie is the USS Enterprise and I think that is what I will use it for, adding it to my growing AWI-1812 American fleet. This is also my very first try at the toilet paper sea base method. It is certainly easier and takes less time than my usual vinyl plaster method, but just seems a little flat to me. Maybe using more layers of TP would give it more depth? Let me know what you think!

Port side scratch guns

Starboard side scratch guns

Quarter scaling shot

10 gun card sloop next to a Navwar bomb ship

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: