Saturday 14 January 2017

Galleon Shipyard

So far my Galleys & Galleons games have used models from my Napoleonic naval collection, which is all well and good and, for some things, such as the galleys and junks, perfectly acceptable. However I felt I wanted some ships more in keeping with the period, but didn't really want to fork out much in the way of cash for them. So I decided to scratchbuild some vaguely pre-18th Century vessels at a nominal 1/1200th scale. They are inspired by and based on the designs from HERE and HERE.

I started with some lolly sticks, available at all good arts and crafts shops.


I chopped them up. At the moment I am working with hull lengths of about 25mm, 30-35mm and 40mm, to give me three different sizes of ship.


The pieces assembled and glued. In this era it doesn't matter if each vessel is individual in terms of size and layout, so accuracy isn't to essential when measuring and assembling.

This is a middle-sized ship - a galleon of some sort.


The next stage was to attack the ships with an emery board in order to shape them. They are much wider than they should be, but the are supposed to be impressionistic rather than realistic. The filing also allows me to correct any wobbly assembly.

These are a trio of the very smallest ships.


And then, masts. Made from toothpicks.

These are two middle-sized galleons, along with a larger one.


The fleet expands: two large galleons, four medium galleons and six smaller ships.



And after the sheer-hulks have been in, they all have masts.


Next stage: Painting

10 comments:

  1. That's ingenious, thanks for sharing! I'll hunt for some lolly sticks...

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    1. In the US you're looking for popsicle sticks. I found two sizes in our local arts/craft shop - the ones I got are 1cm wide but I think there were larger ones that were 1.5cm as well. I got about 200 of the things for $4 - each ship uses no more than two :)

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  2. Those are brilliant! Will bookmark that idea.

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  3. Smashing stuff! Can't wait to see them painted.

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  4. Thanks for the nice comments everyone. I can't really take any credit for the idea - if you follow the links at the top of the post you'll see that I'm standing on the shoulders of giants here :)

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  5. Great idea, I'll have to copy this

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  6. Very interesting and inspiring

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  7. I'll just repeat what the others are saying - This is great! I might have to have a go!

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