These are not toys but exercises in the creation of alternate universes.

In a small, shabby room in an Encino community center, a brotherhood obsessed with tiny visions of lost grandeur each month conducts something like an oral examination for a Ph.D. in maritime history and digital dexterity.

The atmosphere is the unsparing camaraderie of a war council or cowboy campfire.

Someone brash enough to utter the words “intricate, expensive toys” risks being pinned to the wall by whittling knives. These are not toys but exercises in the creation of alternate universes. Here, at the monthly meeting of the San Fernando Valley Model Ship Building Club, functional perfection can be frozen in little doses, defying time, as the schooners and men o’ war that sailed the oceans of the real world could not.

Members are displaying their works in progress for critiques. One holds up a partially finished model of the Nimbus, a Gloucester mackerel boat of the 1870s.

“The scale doesn’t seem to be consistent,” a colleague observes.

“The beam is too broad for the type,” a man in a blue parka comments.

The demonstrator holds up a miniature of the Rattlesnake, an American privateer in the Revolutionary War. It was captured by the British, recaptured by the Americans, recaptured by the British and changed hands twice more during the War of 1812.

It is based on the original plans, he says.

“The British didn’t take the plans of ships they didn’t incorporate into the Royal Navy,” protests Blue Parka.

Murmurs rumble through the room. Historical precision is a religion here, enforced with the zeal of a Salem witch tribunal.

“Yes, they did,” interjects a man in a plaid wool shirt. “If it was special, something of interest to them. That’s why American maritime history exists mostly in Britain. Colonial American shipbuilders threw the plans away once the ship was in the water.”

He is gray-haired. The group of 15 is exclusively male, almost all of them in their 40s and 50s. Beepers keep going off and are ignored.

A dispute breaks out over the proper colors to paint the Rattlesnake, leading to a dispute over the proper way to trace the ship’s history.

Joe Seela of Sherman Oaks displays his 2-foot-long model of the Royal Katherine, an 84-gun ship of the line that defended England from 1664 to 1741.

So that it will be the proper colors without painting, he uses wood of different colors--pear, apple, cherry, ebony, white holly, walnut, cocabola and bloodwood (a natural red, for the decks that the Royal Navy painted scarlet to conceal from those engaged in a sea battle the distracting amount of bloodshed).

The ship’s ribs are made in sections and joined by tiny ebony pegs half the size of pencil erasers, because the real ship had to be built that way. There is no reason to build the model that way, except to make it correspond. With the ship finished and the decks in place, the difference will not be visible.

“I bought a dentist’s drill recently, so that should help” drilling the hundreds of tiny holes, he observes. He has 500 hours invested and will need another 1,000 to finish.

Seela is unusual, a professional among hobbyists. He sells his ships to a gallery in New York for “a couple of thousand a ship,” he says, and turns out four or five models a year.

“Our Henry Kaiser,” he is called by the others, many of whom have been working on the same models for two, three, four or more years.

The name recalls the World War II industrialist who churned out Liberty Ships. So does Burt Goldstein of Northridge, who has brought a 40-inch-long model of a Liberty Ship.

“This was launched as the Benjamin R. Curtis in 1942,” he says. Sold after the war to French owners, it was named the Grandcamp when its explosive cargo blew to smithereens in the harbor at Texas City, Tex., on April 16, 1947, setting off an epic disaster that took more than 468 lives.

“Unfortunately,” Goldstein mourns, “when the ship blew up, it took with it the people who knew what colors it had been repainted and what other modifications had been made.”

His colleagues commiserate with his loss.

Geoff Grosgarth’s model of a mundane sailing dinghy appears dowdy, at first glance, beside the warships haloed in sails.

Grosgarth of North Hollywood, a slim, scholarly looking man with plastered-down hair and steel-rimmed glasses, explains that it is a replica of a boat he actually sails. The wood in the model corresponds to the wood in the larger craft, much of it actually skinned from the mother ship to create this clone.

Grosgarth points out the turnbuckles that tighten the rigging. They are one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter and 3/4 of an inch long, about the size of a fragment of thick pencil lead. Each has three pieces. Two screw into the barrel of the third, one at each end.

He could find no turnbuckles of the proper scale in hobby shops, he says, “and I wanted all the fittings to work just as they do on the real boat,” so he machined his own, from stainless steel, under a microscope.

The brethren, slouched in folding chairs, straighten with respect as this sinks in.

“I bought a lathe,” he says. “It took me two or three years to learn how to operate. It took a lot of patience.”

The others pick up examples of the turnbuckles and rotate the almost invisible screws.

“Smooth as silk,” one sighs.

It is a climax that cannot be topped. Cradling their models in their arms like babies, they file out the door, calling to each other to meet at a coffee shop on Ventura Boulevard where they gather after each meeting “to talk some more about the ships.”