John and Boat Building

Back in the days before the comic strip, John would spend his spare time making ship models. When we got married he was about 20% done with a Tea Clipper he had started from scratch - no kit, no plans. She took over 15 years to complete. (not surprising, considering we started a family and John began his pursuit of syndication)

She currently resides in our living room inside an enormous (6 feet high, almost 7 feet long) oak and plexiglass case designed and built by John and my stepfather in law, Bob.

Below are some close ups - everything is hand carved or made out of things like paper clips (the winch) and the copper bottom is covered in lord knows how many tiny pieces of copper foiling tape, cut to scale and applied individually.

To read more about John's boat building exploits, go to his Cartoonist Studio page here and click on his blog. (Unfortunately I can't link directly to the blog page for some reason.)