7/10 - Quite Good
While walking in the countryside on this beautiful warm spring-in-January day, I was pondering
standards in (my) modelling. I'm happy with my Alert. It's quite good, especially as it's only my third completed wooden boat build. (It was preceded by the Vanguard Models
Zulu, which is a simple fishing boat and the Artesania Latina
Le Renard privateer cutter (and a few nameless failures)). I have seen much worse and much better builds online, and much, much better off line, usually in museums.
However, I don't compare myself to anyone else in the hobby because I'll become either vain or envious if I do that. Instead I compare my
actual achievement in shipbuilding with what I believe to be my
potential, if I really put the required time and effort in. I'm very close to the end now and I estimate that I've scored seven out of a possible perfect ten. I'm rather chuffed with that. 'Quite good' was a solid achievement in the England in which I grew up, before everyone forgot how to write judgements in anything less than histrionic superlatives (or little pictograms for those entirely without words
).
The way I use my numerical scale, to raise my game to 8/10 I'd have to spend twice as much time on a build, with multiple do-overs, and reduce the cheating to situations where I could think of no other way to do something. Here on Alert I've 'cheated' (e.g. by using knots instead of seizings) whenever I just couldn't be bothered to do the right thing and almost never had a second attempt at anything. Building Alert to an 8/10 standard would take me 20 months.
The next step up would be no cheats at all, but massive improvements to everything, every single part of the kit. That would be another doubling of time invested taking the build to well over three years. I'd be replacing almost all of the wood with scratched components, building a full interior and setting it in a diorama with a crew. I've done all these things in plastic models so I'm not just fantasising here.
A perfect ten would be to do all of those things, scratchbuilt, in a larger scale and would be at least a third doubling. Eighty months of thirty hour weeks because that's how much bench time I have spent when really inspired and working at max potential. I've never kept that up for more than a few weeks and eighty months would add up to 10500 hours. Given sufficient incentive I could do that. I'd do it for a million quid (in regular cash instalments please). To do it just to kill time, for me would be idiocy and would drive me nuts.
And that's why "7/10 quite good" is very satisfying to me.
I realise that you have all been doing it for years. 
