Tiny Boats
Finally catching up on the Twitch VOD of this since it happened in Australia on Australia time. This past September I was approached by @stringerplz part of PA crew to make some roughly hewn tiny boats for a game of Pirate Borg to be played at PAXAUS. The timeline was a little tight but the project intrigued me and so away I went on their commission to make four ships inspired by the age of sail to be crafted in such a way that they may look like ships made by pirates for an ongoing tabletop game.
Initially I thought I would design them in cad and do the outlines on the cnc mill but they were just too tiny for that to make sense so after some research into the profiles and estimated sizes (1inch per 50ft of ship) I printed some outlines and cut them out by hand.
Since they needed to look hand carved in the end I selected the most dense carvable wood I had on hand to use which was some European pearwood which would be heavy enough to support the masts and respond cleanly to a blade finish.
As much as possible I stuck to traditional tools (chisels, rasps, files, saws, knives)
To achieve the "hand-carved" look but still have it look nice I spent most of my time shaping the ships general figure and then used a spoon carving finish technique which I've generally seen referred to as a "blade finish" but its making lots of small very smooth surface cuts to create almost facets.
Once a ship was nearly finished I painted the ship body with india ink to replicate age of sail carbon black paints that were often used on most ships of the age (pirate or not) and would be something a pirate could produce in a number of ways with things on hand. The masts were all made with brass rod which could be shaped from brass nails and rivet posts which were often used in nautical applications where iron would corrode. The sails are all made out of template linen and the thread is a mix of cotton thread and bookbinders linen twine. I did my best to simulate at least a suggestion of the correct style of rigging for each ship type with the frigate and galleon having large square sails most folks attribute to pirate ships but the sloops were historically "gaff-rigged" which was a four corner sail that used a gaff bar instead of a cross beam to hang the main sail.
I'm glad Laura (@stringerplz) reached out to me b/c I had a lot of fun with the project and it did make me a little interested in making mini hardwood boats, though maybe a bit larger than 1" per 50ft scale.
I'm really pleased with how well they managed to portray a little naval scene on the stream and it seemed like folks liked them. I especially appreciate seeing Limithron the creator of Pirate Borg's reaction in the twitch chat.
You can watch the twitch recap of the stream here: