A Passion for Detail

David Sherwood puts in a 50-hour week tinkering with his boat, but it’s not the kind that sits in the water, begging for constant TLC.

His passion is a 48-inch-long model ship, a meticulously crafted replica of the British warship HMS Alfred, launched in 1778. Sherwood has worked on it seven days a week for the past two years--and he figures he’s still got another year to go.

If you admire such patience and the ability to work wonders with a sliver of wood, you can watch Sherwood and other local shipbuilders demonstrate their talents this month at the Ventura County Maritime Museum at Channel Islands Harbor.

As part of the harbor’s Maritime Days celebration, they will be working on their models Saturday and Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. They’ll be back again Aug. 16, 17, 23 and 24.

You can look over their shoulders while they use instruments as precise as a Swiss jeweler’s file and drill bits so slender they’re almost invisible. While you’re there, you can peruse the museum’s collection of 60 model ships and another 30 models on loan from an Orange County model-building guild.

Don’t get the idea that these beauties are built from kits like model airplanes. They’re pieced together from scratch, after builders diligently research the original plans. Even after that, construction demands a lot of ingenuity, as well as a strict adherence to scale--3/10-inch to the foot, in Sherwood’s case.

“What the plans leave out would fill books,” Sherwood said, as he showed off his partially built ship, set up in the dining room-turned-workshop of his Ventura home.

When he tackled the ship’s 74 cannons, he realized it would take him 20 days to craft them out of brass on a lathe in the usual fashion. After all that, he would still have to polish and chemically blacken them. But store-bought cannons didn’t meet his critical standards.

So he figured out a way to mass produce them from ebony, a naturally black wood, using a metal template and a special attachment for his lathe. His short cut was written up in June’s issue of the Nautical Research Journal.

Sherwood, 53, built his first model when he was about 20, after admiring a sailboat at Santa Barbara Harbor. But that was 14 years after his initial interest in old ships was piqued. When he was 6, he spotted a calendar with a picture of the USS Constitution and asked if he could have it. It still hangs framed in his work area.

Now retired with a medical disability, Sherwood previously ran a compass-repair business in Oxnard and taught navigation. Now he devotes all his time to shipbuilding, and so far has finished six models. On weekends during the school year, he teaches the art to members of the museum’s modeling guild.

And art it is. To be convinced, all you need is to see the back end of the ship. There, Sherwood has reproduced in miniature the carved statues of England’s educationally minded king, Alfred the Great, resting his arm on a book, surrounded by four females, symbolizing the different aspects of the British empire.

“That was a little nightmare,” he said, referring to the tiny carvings that are so detailed you can see the king’s mustache and beard. He drew them on boxwood, cut them with a chisel and band saw, then gently used a jeweler’s file for the fine detail. He had to do each of them two or three times to get them perfect.

He’s a stickler for perfection. Using light Brazilian satinwood and the dark ebony for contrast, he produces models authentic down to the tiniest detail. The HMS Alfred even includes minuscule hinges he fashioned out of ebony. Nearly 1,000 wood pieces make up the ship’s frame.

Sherwood even drilled thousands of tiny holes in the wood, inlaying each with a sliver to match the look of the wooden pegs that held the original HMS Alfred together until it was scrapped in 1814 after the Napoleonic Wars.

To save money, Sherwood mills his own lumber in the garage. His dining room is crammed with sanders, drills and high-intensity lights.

One thing he doesn’t have to worry about, though, is the inevitable accumulation of sawdust. He has rigged up a vacuum-hose attachment for his power tools that carries debris through the wall and into an 18-gallon tank in the garage.

BE THERE

Ventura County Maritime Museum, Channel Islands Harbor, 2731 S. Victoria Blvd., Oxnard, is open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily during the summer. Admission is free; donations requested. For information, 984-6260.