'I Love the small of Balsa Wood in the morning....

....It smells of ....shipbuilding!'

The Rayleigh shipyards resumed the ACW ship building in earnest yesterday with the first of the projected 14 models underway. These are another three City class gunboats - 'Pook's Turtles' - and I need to merely add the front and rear panels to the casemates prior to fitting out with the gunports, hatches, pilot houses and funnels. It does mean I will have the seven vessels in the class which will be useful when I consider any campaign activity. As ever, pictures will follow in due course although as these ships have been seen before that may be considered to be a little bit of a cheat on my part!

I have been giving some thought to the 'walking beam' ships and will probably tackle the first of them once the city class and the final three Union ships are built - the three timberclads: Lexington, Tyler and Conestoga with the former featuring in the picture above.

The final point of modelling note is that I been experimenting with masts and spars using that old standby of wooden cocktail sticks. The ones I have been using are made from bamboo and area little on the thick side but the early signs are very encouraging. I made a lateen rig - for those not of a naval persuasion that is a triangle shaped sail normally associated with such things as 16th century galleys (I cannot for the life of me think why I should have picked such a subject which coincidentally features the Ottoman Turks and the Barbary Corsairs to a large degree.....) - and thus far it looks pretty robust and certainly has a lot of potential. I will try a similar approach for a square rig and see how that turns out and in the meantime will see if I can source a better make of cocktail stick.