The Good Ship Gilgamesh

Ahoy mateys! I have had a desire to build a ship for my 28mm fantasy gaming for a couple of years now. I was off work with an injury and got inspired to take action. 

After much google image searching and mental planning, I settled on the template below..

 

From this template, I sketched out the three hull pieces on poster board, after drawing a 1" grid on it.



 

 

I cut out the pieces from 1" XPS foam insulation using my Proxxon hotwire table cutter. I beveled the edges a little to make it "shipshaped". I used a pen and xacto knife to cut in the wood grain on the decks.

 

 

I carved out the stairs and doorways

 

 

I thought about carving the sides of the ship to the right shape. This was not working well with the tools I had and because of the awkward shape of the hull. I went with plan B instead. I peeled the paper off of a sheet of 5mm foamcore. I drew in the planks with a pen and textured the foam with a wire brush. I cut this sheet into rough semblances of the sides of the ship and hot glued them in place. I used my xacto knife to fine to the fit. I also rough out a piece for the stern.

 

 

At this point I had a ship! I started to add details from my bits box. A trip to Home Depot yielded a bag of nails to use as rail posts, wood decorations for the stern castle, a bunch of doweling for masts, PVC plastic tubing to hold the masts in the hull and crack filler putty to cover up my mistakes. The Dollar store provided string for rigging, grommits for the port holes and a resin Cherub for the bow decoration.

 

I made lots of paper templates to get the stern castle pieces right. The Proxxon cutter worked the trick for shaving this sheets of foam to cut into shape. I found a picture of Sir Francis Drake's flagship, The Revenge, and modeled the stern castle of it. I was very pleased with the results but if I were to do it again, I would give the ship more upward slope towards the stern and add some height to the stern castle.

 

 

 

I was finally ready to paint after about 12 hours of work. I got out my Modpodge and added brown paint. This gave an undercoat as well as a hardness to the model. Stay tuned for the finished paint job and the addition of rigging and masts