Winston:
Great question! Being a former mechanical draughtsman (I use the old spelling, as I did my work in ink on vellum), I can build anything from a set of properly drawn plans. The key word being properly! Most of the plans that I have seen lack details and have very few, if any dimensions. Proper scale is also a probem. The ship I'm presently working on, the Independence by AL claims its 1:35 scale. If that's correct, then the ship, a topsail scooner, is approx. 45' long with cannon that you could put in a holster on your belt. A scale of 1:64 seems more proper, but I'm not even sure about that.
I believe the problem we face is the time factor. We're building ships from the 16th, 17th and 18th century in the 21st century. We have no people that we can write to or talk to face to face who sailed or built these types of ships. Anything we do is written down in
books from ages past. We can't go directly to a human source and ask questions as to how something was constructed, adjusted, placed, etc. Also, many of the ships offered as models have no known plans or specifications, they exist as a name and type in aa ancient book somewhere.
The companies that make these models we build are not going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to research a given ship, they are going to sell a
kit that is easy for them to manufacture, and if they have to take liberties with certain
parts (do they belong on that period ship, etc.) and how they're to be assembled, they'll do so.
I've tried to
read as many books as I can on sailing ships, and as you would know, I'm still mistified as to how different parts of a ship are assembled, built, what did the use for
material, etc.
I'm one that's willing to learn, I just need to know where I can find the information without spending bucket loads of money on buying plans, books, and all that! That's why I think that's it's people like us who are preserving a time of history. Maybe we don't have the actual ship, but we can have models that show what they were like.
V.W. Miller
