Day four and sail away..
Posted on February 6, 2008
Of course I always feel great satisfaction once I put the last touch on a model, but I am also very critical of my work. Maybe not noticeable to the layman, but I am unhappy with the width of the masts. They are not exactly to scale. Also, some of the rigging is not sufficiently stretched. To much pull on one side and it will hang loose on the other side, so I start to tighten the loose cordage only to loosen up the opposite rigging. The rigging is a real pain on such a small model and it takes hours and a ton of patience to do it. I sometimes wonder how I can do this nitty gritty stuff with my “carpenter” type hands.
Tomorrow the model will be crated, together with its base and showcase, and shipped to Maui
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Day 3
Posted on February 4, 2008
After my third day of working on this model, the deck and the mast steps were placed and I started to mount the railings. When ever it may enhance the beauty of a model, I like to use different type of exotic and indigenous color coordinated species of wood to build my canoes. So for example on this small Hokulea the deck is made out of curly Koa and curly Primavera, Noni for the railings and Macademia for the big water guard, Tamarind for the manus.
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Bart’s sawmill.
Posted on February 1, 2008
Once upon a time there was a beautiful, although unkept , nursery right behind the white fence you see in the enclosed picture. Actually there was no fence those days, alongside H2 freeway, only those Koa Formosa trees. Various species of palm trees and some indigenous plants used to grow in this nursery. Wild boars loved to roam and forage in it, not for palm tree roots or seeds, but for the many passion fruits that grew around the vinery. Behind the houses that are there now used to be Bart P. sawmill and I vividly remember the many logs of Eucalyptus Robusta Bart used to store and mill at this place. The sawmill has gone and so the passion fruits. The boars made space for the people to move in but they are not gone, I can still spot them, sometimes 6 to 8 at a time, foraging for fallen mango fruits.
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Connecting the hulls
Posted on February 1, 2008
Day 2 of making the small 12″ Hokulea model. Certainly the most tricky and time consuming step in building this small model is connecting the 2 carved hulls with their wimsy small beams at their precise intervalles. Honestly I hate to do it. One would need kids hands, everything is so small and pieces tend to fly away at the slightest interference. But once all this is done, its time to place the gunnels and the hull to hull spreaders. After that its plain sailing so to speak although I still need to assemble or place more than 100 little components to call it Hokulea, and each little individual component needs to be cut, shaped, sanded and lacquered before it can be place on the model.
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