Ship Modelling

Welcome to my little shipyard :)

This is Hellers´ plastic kit of the "Niña"

I started building ship models out of the kit box, looong ago as a child. I kept to the plans given, used the colours as described, and bound the lines as indicated ...

But then I found the mismatch between the kit plans and the real sailing ships: the real rigging was much more complicated, and missing in the plans, or completely wrong... today I know why: plastic model kits are produced by companies that want to sell easy-to-do kits. The average hobby modeller is (rightly) assumed not to put much efford into his hobby "work", otherwise it would be overdemanding. There are ship kits for advanced modellers, but they are even more rare (sailing ships are the smallest branch of all model kits). So they simplify the plans, and 99% of all buyers are content ... I just belong to the 1% who are not.

So I started looking for information on my own, but that was hard: nobody would even understand my questions ... so I looked for books instead. In fact, my first non-child book was about maritime history, back in 1975...

Over 30 years I collected about 100 books of maritime literature, but in 2006, I found an entire private library for sale at a Swedish second book shop. Eventually I bought the entire library, 850 volumes! Now I have enough sources to go on with :)

This is what real ship modelling is about: building the ship is 5% of Your time, 95% is research!

In the last years I reconstructed many riggings on paper. Original plans are still very hard to find.

Here, I can finally present to You some of my results ...