If you look closely at Derek Burchill’s model ship, The Victory, it’s not hard to see exactly why it’s been a project 18 years in the making.
“The fancy furniture on it, the cannons and making the blocks, you know, the ropes go through ... you’re talking half a millimetre, a millimetre in size,” he explained.
“One piece, for instance, that I showed you, the curve piece, that took me a month to figure it. It was just so difficult to get all those twists and get it right, but that’s the way it goes.”
In total, the Miramichi, N.B., man has completed 16 model ships throughout his lifetime, some even with 36 working mechanisms, but The Victory is extra special.
“This boat is scratch-built, and it is I guess sort of the crowning jewel of all my work,” he said.
Working from the bottom up, every piece is handcrafted down to the very last detail.
Burchill says he even completed cabins inside the ship, which can only been seen if you shine a flashlight at a certain angle, but it was important to him that they were there to make it as realistic and authentic as possible.
“Every little piece that you do is a challenge and so it’s really the challenge of trying to accomplish what you’re supposed to do and learn and figure out how to do it,” he said.
“That’s really the thing and of course you only have to learn once because once you learn how to do something you’ll never forget after spending so much time trying to figure it out.”
While it’s been a project that he’s been working on for nearly two decades, Burchill said he took two extended breaks -- one that lasted five years and the other three.
He also usually only dedicates January until the beginning of April in his workshop putting it together.
“Having built all these ships, and they’re all from kits, but even though they were kits you still have to do an awful lot of work on all pieces that go together. The planking all has to be shaped and so on and so forth. But I decided that, ‘OK, I want to build another ship, but this time I want to start from scratch. Research it,’ and you spend as much time researching it and trying to figure out how to do it as opposed to the actual labour of doing it.”
Burchill says he’s always been drawn to the water. His great-great grandfather used to build ships that would transport lumber over to England and he’s always been a fan of the water.
“We used to build rafts with two logs and so long and put a square sail on them and away we went, so really a love of the water and just loved to sail and so on and over the years I had different types of sailboats,” he said.
Burchill’s first build was in 1970 -- a Man-of-War ship, which took him 2,200 hours to complete and marked the start of his decades-long hobby.
“When I first showed them at a show, back 15 years or so ago at the rink, it was a home show, and people would come up and look at them and it drew a huge crowd, but some of my friends would say, ‘Where’d you buy that? You didn’t build that’,” he joked.
However, with The Victory standing tall in his workshop, there is no denying his craftmanship.
“It’s a lot of fun. I mean the whole idea, the enjoyment is building. It’s not after it’s finished,” he said.
“I’m 78, so I don’t know how much more time I’ve got here, but I have to say that this Victory is going to take another year at least.”
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