Pandora's Box

About 3 years ago, I worked in Sydney and commuted to work by train. I spent many hours on the train due to the 2.5hr commute and got home late every night. I found that I didn't have much of an opportunity to wind down at the end of the day and catching up with friends was hard because it was late by the time I got home.

So I decided to take up a hobby.

Watching the TV one morning before heading off to the train station I saw an ad for one of those build an <insert crafty thing here> magazine subscription. This one in particular was a model of an aircraft carrier and I was inspired. I bought the first magazine for $2.95 or whatever the reduced first magazine hook price it was and then proceeded to read up about it. I soon discovered that the price of the next edition was obscenely more ($15 or so) and that the number of magazines in the subscription was around 100........... i.e. $1500 to get all the parts of the ship!!!!!!

This price did not include tools, glue, paints, etc. but rather just the parts that made up the ship. Not exactly the investment I was looking for. So a quick trip down to the local hobby shop one weekend and I found that they supplied a whole stack of model boats/ships/etc. of different skill levels, complexity and quality.

The attendant at the shop advised me to take on one of the smaller, less complicated boats as my first attempt into the world of model ship building but I wasn't listening to that.

Now being the technical Genius (ahem cough splutter) type of person I figured that I had some sort of a clue to how things are made. This was also fueled by the fact that I took Design and Technology (Workshop for those of you who are not in the Australian school system) at School and I decided that I had a fighting chance at building one of the slightly more adventurous ships on display.

Ultimately my intent was not so much of buying a kit that I could quickly put together, rather I was more focused on the process of building the model as a pass time. So I selected a ship that looked pretty and was in my budget rather then trying to match one to my perceived skill level.

The kit I ended up buying was produced by a company called Constructo and it is a model of the HMS Pandora which I later discovered played a minor role in Australian history.

And so I began.

Now for the first little while I went really well, I put in an hour or two every night after work and the ship took shape. I discovered that one of the parts from the magazine subscription came in really handy (a part of the deck laser cut into a piece of plywood) and keeping this piece in its original state it made a great surface for steaming the planks of wood on with my mums clothes iron.

But there were changes on the horizon.

Not too long after buying this kit I decided to leave my job in Sydney after finding about an opening with where I work now. And soon after fell in love with my beautiful wife, and the time I dedicated to my project dwindled to nothing.

After a while I packed up my incomplete ship into a box and stored it away hoping to return to it when things settled down after my wedding. The house we moved into as newlyweds was rather small and we never fully unpacked there. Then after a year our circumstances changed and we were able to afford to live in our own home.

A few months passed since moving in and I remembered my ship and decided to work on it again. So I cleared some room in my study and set up a card table and unpacked my ship.

Since then I have completed the the hull, and started to add the detail to it. I have a long way to go to complete it as I have to cut out all the little bits, paint the various metal parts, sew the sails and tie all the rigging, but it is slowly taking shape, and I am having a ball working on it once again.

So here is the progress of my ship so far

Hope you enjoyed.

Cheers