‘I can almost look at any old horse and know who carved it.’

A horse’s mane blowing wildly in the wind. The hunched leg of a rabbit preparing to leap. With chisel in hand and a supply of pine and bass wood, John Sinclair fashions the carrousel figures of his imagination. Sinclair, 67, began his apprenticeship as a shipbuilder when he was 15 years old in Scotland. It wasn’t until his retirement 3 1/2 years ago from National Steel & Ship Building Co. that he turned to crafting miniature carrousel figures. Confessing he “didn’t know a horse from a hole in the ground,” Sinclair read books and studied hundreds of photographs before embarking on a craft that usually takes years to master. Now, the living room of his Point Loma home is a jumble of vividly painted horses, frogs and rabbits. Times staff writer Caroline Lemke interviewed him and Dave Gatley photographed him.

I like working with wood. I have a kind of feel for it. Wood is strange stuff. It’s all got grain. Sometimes you can cut it this way, but you can’t cut it that way because it will go crossways. There’s a feel for it with a chisel. You can’t fight the wood. You have to sort of follow it and be careful what you’re doing.

The way I started . . . my wife and I have a daughter up in Berkeley. We went to a restoration studio there and my daughter saw a full-size carrousel rabbit at $30,000. She loved it and I said, “Goodness! I can buy a chisel for $5.” So I made a rabbit and my wife sold it for 300-odd dollars. The reason she sold it was to prove to me that they were worth something acceptable by the public. Then I made another rabbit and that’s how the whole business started.

I subscribe to both the “Merry Go Round” and the “Carrousel News and Trader.” And you get loads of photographs. I’ve looked at so many photographs now I can draw the plans without looking at photographs. I’ve got it down pat so I can almost look at any of the old carvers’ horses and know who carved it.

I’ll buy the lumber, and the body is made like a box. The body is hollow, always. Even the old carvers made hollow horses. I can make them more or less the way they did because I found out through reading and through experience that that’s the best way. I’m not near as fast as they were. They were doing it on an eight-hour-a-day basis all their lives and they had the skill. I haven’t, so I just fool around.

I really don’t sell them. My wife sold the first rabbit for $300 and then when I was down at the Carrousel Fair at Seaport Village last year, I carved a horse. It was the best of the bunch, because they keep improving. And a guy came up with his wife and he wanted to buy it and I said, “I don’t sell them. I don’t make enough to sell. It’s not my business. I don’t want to make it like work.” But he insisted and asked how much it was, and my wife, out of the blue, she’s terrible, says “It’s $1,200,” without batting an eyelash. And he says, “OK.”

I don’t want to sell them. They are around the house. We have a lot of fun because my wife has made a videotape where she’s interviewing me while I’m carving. And we take all the horses in two cars, as many as we can manage, even the one that isn’t finished, and we display them at senior groups. We do it just for the heck of it. And my wife shows the tape and the horses are on display and the people obviously like it because so many folks don’t know how horses are made.

The second reason I don’t sell them is because I always thought, “Hey, I used to be in shipbuilding. I can’t give our kids a ship, so maybe I can give them a horse.” I intend to eventually give each of them some sort of animal or horse. But I’m not doing it for my family. I’m doing it because of the challenge. I guess I may be a little artistically inclined because I like this sort of thing. I like working with wood.

They’re kind of nice to have around. We use them as ornaments and we can transport them. I think we have too many, I always want to take them downstairs, but my wife won’t let me. I took one of them downstairs once and she said, “Where’s our horse?” I had to go get it.