Hello everyone. Time for my weekly update.
Mostly I just continued work on the standing rigging and rat lines. Playing around with loads of techniques of dealing with fuzz and searching for an alternative to CA glue.
I also joined the RockyMountain Shipwrights club!! What a great bunch of guys. Several of them are world class. During the meeting we got into an interesting discussion of establishing the value of these models that we slave over for years at a time. The subject was brought up by a member that had just finished a Sovereign of the Seas from a very very old kit. I saw a picture and it was beautiful. His complaint was the fact that you can purchase a completed build from China or somewhere for $500 to $900.
That is when things got interesting. One of the members had been contracted by the Denver Brown Palace (owned by the unsinkable Molly Brown - a famous survivor of the Titanic) to restore 13 of their model tall ships. They are on display in the "Ships Tavern" bar in building. These are scratch builds from the 1930's and he was entrusted to clean and refurbish them. He told the group it was the most nerve wrecking thing he'd ever done. The are insured for $1.2m (that is for all of them). he was not allowed to remove them from the building so he did his work on them in office above the tavern. On Wednesday I am going to go take my wife there for lunch and a beer and check them out. I'll take a few pics and post them.
We then got into the discussion of how to go about valuing the models that we do. It depended on the size and complexity of the model of course but these bigger "Expert" models should be insured for between $10k and $20k, via a rider on your home insurance. Scratch builds from master shipwrights can go for up to $50k. They can be considered as a work of art.
I peruse around this board a lot trying to learn how to do things but I have never seen any discussion about valuation. Was our discussion totally out of line or is this what is generally accepted for valuing these completed models.
Ok - for my weekly update. I just kept tinkering with with rigging and ratlines. The foremast is completely finished and I am now working on mainmast ratlines. Once this is done I'll connect the outer side stays. I am going to stick with my current thread for the ratlines but I'll switch to a different thread (one that is less fuzzy) for the running rigging. Even though this thread is fuzzy I think it would look funny if half of the ratlines were with one thread and the other half with a different thread.
BTW - those are not ice cubes, they are hail stones. Mostly dime sized with the odd quarter sized one in there. Made a lot of noise and I was glad to have a garage.
Oh Oh. I found that the candle wax produces a lot of candle was dust. So I took to hitting the thread with a blow drier and melt it in. Works Great!!!
I look forward to opinions about valuations.
Scott
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