First off, thanks for the kind words, everyone! It was pictures of boats on this board that inspired me to undertake this thing, and many are far better and less clunky in places than mine. Mine does, however, have the advantage of being obnoxiously big, which suits me fine. I'm obnoxiously big myself, and often tumble into or over furniture, so it seems appropriate.
I took the finished boat outside to get some pics with decent lighting.
Here's the boat with my daughter, for scale. The one is bigger than the other.
The port of call for the Marietta was to be Sandakan, a port city in Borneo, but I had Samarkan in my head when writing it and mixed the two. Sandarkan is a real place, a landlocked Iranian city which would clearly not be the city of origin for this boat. In my head, the painter got it wrong and the ship's master was too cheap to get it fixed.
I didn't have any suitable crew miniatures for scale, so I'm using star wars figures. I know, I know.
If bridge deck is removed, one can access the upper deck. The weathering is somewhat severe, as I was having to reach into some tight spots. The door knobs are pinheads, the lights lot jewelry from Hobby Lobby, and the floor grating paper needlepoint backing. The doors are balsa, and the grate at the wicker at the bottom of each cabin door plastic needlepoint backing. The cabins are not sectioned off yet, nor finished. The hole in the captain's cabin is for the skylight to the engine room, which drops through all of the decks.
You can see one of the segmented pipes that makes up the whole. The steampipe has a smaller pipe that runs up from the very bottom of the boat. Each deck's pipe slips onto it. This gives stability to each deck and locks the piece together in a way that works well, given that I am clumsy.
The flying bridge/bridge roof also comes off. Inside are an engine speed telegraph, a binnacle, a wheel, a speaking tube, a table, and a cabinet.
The bridge windows are plastic from some package or another. The rails are all chicken wire. The searchlights are Revisco searchlights, and the port and starboard lanterns are pieces of jewelry that I painted to look like they were colored and glowing.
Though most of the "ropes" are stiff and fixed, the front stay is a guitar string.
Atop the flying bridge are gun mounts, though for the period I'm making this for an armed ship might be illegal in certain ports. So the mounts remain, but the guns themselves are absent.
The lifeboats are made of cardstock, from a template from the FREIGHTER MINOS paper model. The oar handles are loophead pin bits, and the tackles holding them to the davits are magnets (you'll see why later). The oars within are just wire and card stock.
The back of the boat has a bit of soot from the smokestack. I totally forgot to put wheels on the doors back there. Oops.
The barrels were all made from wooden spools with round disks atop them, and a small piece of plastic tubing cut off for the spout. A heck of a site cheaper than buying resin oil barrels. All the rope is just thick string with superglue on it to harden it up, then painted.
I realize I didn't get all that much by the way of detail, so I'll take some more pics in the studio and post 'em up tomorrow or the next day.
25 July 2007, 02:59:29 AM
