This project was begun when I thought I had "settled down." I was married, owned a home, had a regular job; we lived a few hundred yards from a small river or a large creek, where I sailed my 16 foot sailboat. I had always wanted to build a large RC square-rigger. A proper scale model. Up til then I had built a myriad of little models, converted plastic kits, and scrap wood oddities, all of which were free-sailing, usually quite simple, and bobbed like corks in open water like Baltimore's Inner Harbor where I pretty much lived in my teens and early 20's. I was also inspired by the
Rattlesnake model I saw in Model Ship Builder magazine #25. (I didn't see this video until about a year ago, I wish I had seen it then:
https://youtu.be/GXVv_vN18QM )
I wasn't planning on building any vessel in particular, but rather a particular rig, a hermaphrodite, or jack-ass bark - basically a bark with a fore-n-aft mains'l instead of a square. My long time friend Mark, who I've sailed and worked with since our early teens suggested
Constellation. I knew the
Constellation well as a hideous, rotten, hogged, anachronism the city was trying pass off as the 1797 frigate. Mark argued that the ship had just begun a restoration back into an 1854 sloop of war, had a Civil War history, local history, and was certainly a square-rigger, and in building a model, I'd have the real ship right there in front of me. I looked into it and found that a builder's half model had recently been discovered at the Naval Academy, and that matching drawings existed in the National Archives.
Looking at drawings in the Archives was amazing. I not only saw, but handled original drawings with pin holes for copying, erasures, handwriting; for someone of my interests, it was like being in a temple and handling sacred texts. I came out of the place with a dozen copies of drawings for
Constellation. Chief among my haul was an 1853 drawing in 1:36 scale (same as the half model) which is the scale I decided to go with. I felt it would be large enough to handle in the creek like a boat, and not a fishing bobber, and the rig could be reduced enough to fit in my SUV.
I started the model in February 1999 and hardly got anywhere before life intervened and it was put aside for more than 10 years before I started to really work on it again.
Almost 10 years after that, I'm still working on this thing, and it's still not finished. I don't know that it ever will really be "finished" but I hope to get to some level of completion before I'm set out with the trash one morning.
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Topic: 1854 Sloop of War Constellation (Read 8417 times)