After a decade of following this forum off and on, I've finally decided to try my first wooden model ship.
I've always been fascinated by wooden ships, especially wooden sailing warships. Every time we've been on vacation and there's a wooden ship museum, I make sure it's on the itinerary. Usually my family is waiting outside while I slowly make my way through the models. What prompted me to finally start a model of my own was a trip to Maine we just returned from, which included a stop at Bluejacket Shipcrafters near Acadia. While I'm several years from retirement, and a busy professional, my youngest is now in college, so I have a little time to start a hobby I've longed to try.
Outside of helping my boys with some plastic models and hundreds of lego sets over the years, I have not built any kind of model since I was a young teenager. I have done some basic home improvement over the years, and have never been afraid to try something myself, but I really have no advanced wood working or model making knowledge I can turn to. I am an educator and scientist so we'll see if any of that transfers over.
The first step of course was to pick a first model. I first found this forum years go when I had inherited an old (never begun) wooden ship model, which probably dated from the 1960s. It had a carved hull, basically no instructions, just sets of plans with no explanation, and piles of metal and wooden parts or fairly low quality. I had no idea where to begin, let alone what to do. I bought a planking book, but I couldn't figure out how to apply what was in the book to the model I had. I thought I'd try a simpler model, but the only real novice model ships that were recommended a decade ago were ones like the Model Shipways Shipwright Series. While I actually like sailing and sailboats, I just was not all that interested in building a sailboat or a fishing boat. I'd lose interest. I wanted to build a warship of some sort. But I just couldn't find one that stepped the beginner through the process.
A decade later, I quickly discovered Vanguard Models and started reading the various reviews, various build logs, and YouTube reviews. And better yet, the instructions are all available online, so I could see not only what building a model entailed, but also how much hand holding there might be. I could get a high quality model (well, at least the parts are high quality, no promises about the finished product), with some fantastic instructions. They are pricey, but from everything I've read and heard, you get what you pay for. The last thing I want to deal with is wood splitting because of poor quality material (as opposed to poor quality ability). And for me, as a complete novice, part of what I'm paying for is a detailed set of instructions, with lots of color photos.
It was a pretty quick decision to go with Vanguard. The next step was which model. They're a new company, so they don't have as many options as some others, but I'm hoping I'll stick with this hobby because I'm excited to see what comes next. The most obvious choice was the Sherbourne, a new model for 2024, designed for the novice. One challenge was that I now have disposable income, so I was really tempted to buy a more advanced model, even if it took me the rest of my life to build. Thankfully, I read the various warnings posted on this forum of people who start a model way beyond their abilities, set up a build log, and never finish it. I also looked closely at the instructions for the Sherbourne compared to other more complex models (and saw some of the plans included with the Sherbourne on various unboxing videos) and realized that the Sherbourne doesn't skip steps in the instructions in ways that more advanced models might. I also knew I wanted to set up a build log, not only to keep myself on track, but because I thought my experience as a complete novice might be useful for others considering or starting this hobby. And finally, I thought that as a novice, if I take on a model ship that is geared toward the novice, there might be more patience with the kinds of basic (silly, stupid) questions I might need to ask here. So Sherbourne was the obvious choice. It's a warship, albeit a small one - well, at least it's armed, I don't know when a ship qualified as a warship in the parlance of wooden ships.
Living in the US, I was going to order from Age of Sail, but there were out of stock, and it was going to be a month before they were restocked with the Sherbourne. So I instead ordered directly from Vanguard, which meant paying more because of the exchange rate and shipping. It should arrive by the end of this week.
Next step while waiting for the model to arrive is getting the tools I'll need.
