"Golden Hind", built up of old Pyro models kit reissued by Lindberg models.

Let's take a break from the R-34 posts to look at a model of a much older ship of the British Crown.

Under the classification of weird and wonderful stuff comes this built up small plastic model kit I did around 2000 of Sir Francis Drake's 1577 ship, the "Golden Hind". It was this ship he used to circumnavigate the globe, in the name of the Queen of England. From what I read, he was not a very nice guy. One of his favorite hobbies was "keel dragging" his crew members if he felt they were not working up to his expectations, and such. People said he was more of a pirate, than an explorer. Model kit is a Lindberg models reissue of the old Pyro ship model kit that they issued in the 1950's and 1960's. The hardest part about making this model look somewhat realistic was doing the rigging, and making the mast "rat lines". There is very little instructions with the kit itself for doing the rigging, other than the full size patterns for making the rat lines out of black thread on wax paper over the printed out patterns on the instruction sheet. Using pins to stretch the thread taut over the pattern, first horizontal, then the vertical. Then after you have the threads laid out, you take a brush, and "paint" white glue(Elmers, or equivalent), to glue the threads together where they intersect. When it is dry, you take the pins out, and trim off the excess thread, and glue flash. Now how I did the rigging, I'm not going to even try to explain that! The paintwork I had to do beforehand was very involved, too as the model came molded only in white.

Jim.