Model-making me:

My model making career started around 1983 at the age of nine, when my father started playing with radio control cars (a Nissan Fairlady nitro buggy). I soon joined in after I got a Tamiya Wild Willy for Christmas. I was also very much taken by the beautiful RC-ships that were available, and another Christmas present turned out to be a Graupner kit for a pretty, old-fashioned harbour tug. However, my dad lost patience and my schoolboy’s craft-skills were not up to the task, so she disappeared half finished in the attic and I turned towards easier targets. Over the next two decades, some two hundred plastic kit sets left my bench, ships, cars, trucks, motorcycles, airplanes and all.

Meanwhile I was reading pretty much everything about ships and airplanes that I could get my hands on. I found I was always fascinated by the pioneers of technology, airplanes that were made in a carpenter’s workshop, and Victorian-era ships that seemed so refreshingly different than the familiar classic sailing ships and fully-fledged steamers.

It must have been around the year 2001, when Revell released a re-issue of Matchbox’s old kit of the Flower-Class corvette in 1/72 scale. This boat screamed out loudly for radio control and I remembered my old enthusiasm for RC-boating. Since the engine was chosen without any experience, the ship turned out quite overpowered, speedboat-like. Not scale speed, but good fun and hey, what are speed controllers for? More troubling was that the hard, empty plastic hull was prone to vibration and made a hell of a noise. Anyway, my enthusiasm was roused again and I started building ship models from scratch.

When I spent a few years in New Zealand, I stumbled upon a ship that would make a great beginner’s scratch-building project: a Bavarian self-propelled river barge built in 1913. The hull was more box- than ship-shape and thus quite easy to make. Not pretty as in elegant, but all the more charming.

What made the experience of this build particularly refreshing was the fact that my source consisted out of two pictures of a model in the German Museum (Deutsches Museum) in Munich. I decided against digging up more sources to reproduce the real thing as closely as possible, and do some “precision guesswork” instead,  founded my own shipping-company and gave the boat a name of my choice: Baetis.

On the way, I received a lot of help and picked up quite some skills from the charming gentlemen of the Otago Model Engineers Society, a great place for exchanging tips and tricks, so the next project was quite a bit more ambitious. I had fallen in love with Charles Parson’s Turbinia as soon as I had seen a picture of her ages ago, so she was a natural choice for a project. I was unaware that a plan existed and started to construct a stand-off scale model, again from a few available pictures. Meanwhile, plans have been published and the web yields plenty of good high-resolution pictures of the lovingly restored original, but not before my build had been advanced too far to change anything substantial. My self-constructed hull turned out to be very stable even at velocities far exceeding scale-speed, making the model great fun to sail, and an eye-catcher wherever there are eyes to catch.

Working creatively from limited or even contradictory source material has got me hooked. It enables me to go for the oddball, exotic and downright bizarre originals, whose models would never make it to the lake if we waited for reliable source material first.

At this point I remembered my old soft spot for vintage tin-toy-models. They have a special quality about them, not true-scale, but their lines overdrawn, the term “caricaturesque” springs to mind. I connected the dots, functional model-ships and vintage toy style. 

So the idea was born: why not live in the place where model-boating and arts overlap?

However, I want to create not just static sculptures, but functional models which can be equipped with radio control gear and catch eyes not only on the bookshelf, but on the local lake as well.

My models are constructed almost entirely out of wood and brass, using mainly basic hand-tools. Details are deliberately simplified. The perfect, smooth finish is not on my agenda, my models are painted by brush, which leaves its marks. Sounds crude, but I find it conveys some of the flair of real ships of the era, where legions of seamen were constantly busy laying on yet another thick coat of paint. In harmony with the “Victorian-era-tin-toy-look”, colour-themes tend to be a bit more cheerful as would be realistic, and I like to show brass fittings in their nude metallic surface, like propellers, railings, anchors, winches, portholes (I have to admit, I do not make all of these myself).