IN MINIATURE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 108, 8 May 1937, Page 7

IN MINIATURE.

HISTORIC VESSEL. MAYFLOWER "SAILS" AGAIN. RAILWAYMAN'S FINE WORK. The making of a particularly fine] model of the famous ship Mayflower,! which took the Pilgrim Fathers to] America, has occupied the midnight! hours of Mr. X. D. Howard, of 695 Awa Road, Otahuhu, for the past three months. Completed this week, the quaint little vessel, with her high, carved and gilded poop and her jibboom cocked up into the air at a jaunty angle, is a piece of artistic perfection.

As a result of war disabilities, Mr. Howard, who is a railway signalman, suffers from insomnia, averaging only about six hours' sleep a week. Instead of fretting his nerves by lying awake in 'bed, he finds a soothing occupation in woodwork. He has made practically all the furniture in his home and many artistic ornaments during the hours .when most of the world is asleep.

Until he commenced the building of the miniature Mayflower, however, his only essay in this branch of craftsmanship had been the caning of a model of a Maori war canoe, which he sent to a brother in America. In return his brother sent him the scale plans of the Mayflower, which were published for the first time only last December. Rigging Problem. In his construction of the model, Mr. Howard has followed the plans with the utmost exactness, using a scale of threesixteenths of an inch to the foot. His painstaking attention to details is shown in the workmanlike finish of her woodwork, which was achieved with only the simplest of tools. One of the puzzles that confronted Mr. Howard, as a landsman, was the leading aright of the many halyards, braces, buntlines. bowlines and other running rigging, which was even more complicated in the old-fashioned windjammers than it is in the present-day survivors of the era of;

sail. His difficulties were increased by. the fact that in the plans some of these details were not quite clear, but, since the completion of his model, Mr. Howard has been congratulated by a retired shipmaster on having made not a single error in the vessel's rigging. With all her canvas set, her paint and varnish gleaming, and her tiny cannon, cast in lead, jutting belligerently from her ports, the Mayflower is a handsome little ship for, despite her clumsy-looking upper-works, she has a very shapely hull, her lines below the waterline being as fine and graceful as itliosc of a yacht. She is well worthy of .the 520 hours of exacting work that her builder put into her.