The Little World

I shall call him Bill.

Bill The Weatherman. The danger to navigation that they are always speaking about on the News At Ten. I shouldn’t wonder if there wasn’t a file on him down at the Admiralty.

You see, Bill wrecks things. Cheerfully, and with great abandon. He does it on a professional basis if people will pay him, and as an amateur when trade slackens. I have seen his work upon a Rolls Royce – you will have seen it as well in a report of a WASMEX model show a few years ago. He’s also been extremely unkind to a Bugatti and Bentley as well, which you;ll see one day.

Not content with shore-based depredations, however, he has turned his attention to the sea. He discovered an abandoned model oil tanker ( I suspect it is a re-issue of a classic 50’s Revell kit ) in a storeroom at our modeller’s club and rescued it from the trash bin. How far the rescue actually got before the Coast Guard arrived and they buried the survivors you must judge for yourselves.

He is coming to grips with a material new to him – polyfoam blocks – and has discovered that they come in a surprising variety of consistencies. Some would be a real pain to carve as a sea because the beads that form the foam are loosely held and crumble. Fortunately the local hardware merchant was able to put him onto a structural foam that is bonded and will take a fair amount of shaping.

He was gracious enough to bring the BRITISH SOVEREIGN to my studio along with two other of his carefully distressed models for a photo shoot. I hope the images help him with a website and as long as he doesn’t take the Dremel and the spray gun to my airplanes, we should get on famously.

Oh and here is the vessel in entirety. Note that Bill wisely backs up the foam block with an MDF plate.