Ships of Scale: July 2011 Newsletter


Newsletter	July 2011

In this issue of the July newsletter, I want to feature another ship that was sent to me. The builder is Wim Steensma. This ship is an Egyptian vessel that he built from a kit. Below is his write up. This build is also shown on the main website if you want to see larger images of it.

Enjoy !!
Donnie Driskell

Name: Nave Egizia
Manufacturer: Amati
Scale: 1:50
Length: 35 cm

The model is an Egyptian merchantship used during the governance of King Sahure, who ruled the ancient Egypt from 2487 BC till 2475 BC. These kind of ships transported cedar and ebony from Lebanon to Egypt. At that time shipbuilders didn't use treenails yet, but used a lot of rope, and reed (or other plants) to fix their ships and make them watertight.

Kit:
As usual it contains a build-description, a drawing and several types of wood, but next to that this kit contains a lot of rope. All in good quality and sufficient to build the ship.

Build:
First a warning:
It's a very small ship and so are all the parts of the ship. It's all fragile, so better be careful (own experience).

The only disadvantage of the kit was that keel and frames didn't fit well, there was too much space between them. It was easy to solve by filling the gaps with veneer. Don't forget to drill some holes in the bow and stern after constructing the keel and frames and before planking the hull. It's almost impossible to drill the holes after planking the hull.

I replaced the supplied sail for a homemade one, because In my opinion Amati's sail was too red.

Review:
Again I managed to build an unusual ship, a ship without a keel but with a stabilisation rope and a counterbalanced mast. It was fun to build this beauty, but I was glad having some experience yet, because she is not very easy to build.

Thanks for reading my feature

Kind regards,

Wim Steensma