Many museums and many contests recognize “scratch built” as a major category, and that some people use the term as a synonym for quality.

Just what constitutes a scratch built model anyway? Many articles have been written on this subject. One that I like is in the December, 1993 issue of the Nautical Research Journal, where Gene Larson says they begin with basic materials such as wood strips, but that they can also include standard items such as cordage, chains, fasteners, wire and similar items. It is definitely not a kit. Still, I have many questions.

Most people feel free to use drawings made by others in scratch built models but I think that drawings and other information used to make a scratch built model should be an issue. If the modeler makes use of Jean Boudriot, Harold Hahn, or Erik Ronnberg or some similar expert modeler to do the research, and make the detail drawings used to build the model, he has outsourced the most critical part of the entire process to someone else. How can this be called scratch building? And what about using Warner Woods blocks and gratings or laser cut parts from The Lumber Yard. Does that compromise the scratch built status?

The use of machinery and modern manufacturing technology to make parts raises a whole series of question. Let me give you a specific example. I am building a small 1:192 dockyard model of HMS Prince of 1670. One particularly difficult part at that scale is the figurehead, which is a rider on a horse. The entire figurehead is about one inch tall. I could have simply carved it out of a small piece of boxwood, with great difficulty. Here is how I actually did it.

• I made a drawing of the figurehead at a scale of 1:48 using a drawing from the Science Museum in London and photos of the contemporary model of the Prince for source information. I carved a 1:48 half model of the figurehead by hand from wood. I only needed to make half of the figurehead because it is symmetrical.
  
  

• I gave the half model to Clyde Emerson, who scanned it. (Clyde has a 3-D scanner.) He used his computer to produce a mirror image file, thus creating a digital image of the entire figurehead.
  
  

• Clyde used the digital image file to drive a computer controlled milling machine to produce the actual 1:192 figurehead from a bright yellow piece of boxwood. He cleaned up the figurehead by hand. I received the figurehead back and did some hand work to create some undercuts the milling machine could not make, and to make the figurehead a little more crisp.