One of the problems with running a miniatures company is that it is far too easy to be distracted by your customers’ projects. Another thing that causes distractions for me is discovering some lost treasure from our war gaming past.

My latest distraction is sailing ships. I thought I had all I need when we completed the 24 Hour Fleet project. Well, I guess I was wrong about that! I’ve been eyeing some older sailing ships that Scruby produced before he began producing the ones in current production. I don’t know the history behind these models, but I do like them, so I figured why not build a new fleet using these older ship models? Since I already had a few ships from Jack’s fleet I had a start. After searching through my boxes of masters and patterns I found patterns/masters for the three ships in the range. So, now I was all set, just needed time and mold space. A few weeks back I had a project that I thought was ready for molds, but when I sat down to make the mold, I found some problems with the patterns that I had missed in the first pass review, and the problems were just big enough that it would take several hours to correct (Or maybe even cast new patterns), so since I had things all set to make a mold I pulled out the ship patterns and set out to make a production mold…

Jumping ahead a few days…

Time to cast ships! I’ve now cast a few dozen ships and have started painting them for my war games.

As you can see from the pictures, the ships models are not up to modern standards for style, etc. but they are still nice little models. I think the thing I like the most is that I can paint as little or as much detail as I want.

The pictures show ships from Jack’s collection as well as a ship or two that I’ve recently painted (I’m trying to match the existing ships in style). In the background you will see a pile of unpainted ships.