Pride lies in the details for modelers who show all is : Ship Shape

Bill Wicks became a shipbuilder in a roundabout way, drawn in by the dreams of a cancer-stricken neighbor.

Wicks had just returned from service in Vietnam when he and his wife moved to Culver City in 1965.

“There was a fellow who lived next door who went to sea as a cabin boy on a lumber schooner when he was 9 years old,” recalled Wicks, a barber who now lives in Garden Grove. “He had cancer and he was building a model of the lumber schooner he first went to sea in.

“He asked me if he didn’t finish, could I please finish it and give it to the Cabrillo Beach Museum . . . for his legacy.”

The neighbor died before finishing the model. Wicks’ passion began.

This weekend, you can see Wicks’ current project--the 100-gun British man-of-war HMS Prince--aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, where more than 265 mostly wooden ship models are displayed as part of the biannual Western Ship Model Conference and Exhibit, organized by the Placentia-based Ship Modelers Assn.

The three-day conference, the nation’s largest, has drawn about 210 modelers, and more than 1,000 visitors are expected over the weekend. Hours are from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. today and Sunday; admission is $6 per person, $4 for children.

The key draw for the modelers are the seminars, which can be deadly dull for nonmodelers. Modelers, though, insist the seminars are fascinating, with titles like “Modelmaking as a Method of Scientific Inquiry” by Albert Hoving, curator of ship models at the Reijksmuseum in Amsterdam; and “Using Fiber Optics to Examine the Interior of Ship Models” by Simon Stephens, curator of the British National Maritime Museum.

The exhibits might be models, but they’re a far cry from the plastic-and-glue kits stocked on toy-store shelves. Wicks’ 1670 HMS Prince is 4 feet long and still a work in progress even though he has invested more than 100 hours of labor.

“There are over 6,000 wooden pegs in the hull,” Wicks, 58, said. “The brass guns are all wax-cast, and made with the crest of the gunmaker, and they’re exactly to scale. That’s what makes modeling so interesting--it’s the idea of duplicating something exactly, in a smaller scale.”

Pride lies in the details. The most respected of the modelers adhere to a strict code of historical accuracy, so the ships often are built from copies of original blueprints. Which means the modeler must find the blueprints--not always an easy task.

And the blueprints usually contain design flaws that made sense on the drawing board but not in the shipyard. Records rarely are kept on how shipbuilders converted the plans, with all their flaws, into working ships. And most of the shipbuilders themselves are long dead.

“You don’t just learn about the ship and put it together,” said Dave Yotter of Irvine. “You learn the whole history. People don’t realize that when we build a model, the goal is not to get a finished thing. It’s the process that most people like, figuring out how to do the thing, how to make it right. You have to come up with unique solutions.”

Yotter, at 56 one of the younger members of the Ship Modelers Assn., has spent a decade building a Revolutionary War-era gunboat, designed by Benedict Arnold, that once plied Lake Champlain along the New York-Vermont border. He’s been building models for about 25 years, completing five in all that time.

Yotter’s shipyard is an open area on the second floor of the family home, filled with miniature saws and lathes, tools and parts under construction. It’s an expensive hobby. The table saws cost $350 or so; the lathe costs about $1,000 to buy and convert from the metal-working it was designed to do to miniature wood-turning.

“There’s a lot of adapting involved,” Yotter said. “A lot of us are tool junkies. That’s part of the fun--adapting things.”

And showing off.

Meetings of the Ship Modelers Assn., held in Placentia, give modelers a chance to display works in progress, seek each other’s advice on solving problems, and get members out of their miniature shipyards.

Wicks runs the rookie league of ship modeling, the Mayflower Group, which attracts about 15 people to its monthly meetings.

“We walk them through it, tell them how to read blueprints, what tools they need, what types of wood best suits the purpose of the types of models they’re doing,” he said. “We try to help solve any problems they might have, help them realize that different people have different perspectives, different ways to achieve the same end.”

Wicks views the group as a mutual aid society.

“We critique what they’ve done, what they want to do, criticizing only in a positive way,” Wicks said. “To my way of thinking, it’s good if a person makes a mistake. They realize what they’ve done, and they grow by that mistake.”

Bob Beach, 73, of Brea has advanced well beyond the Mayflower stage. He built his first model as a child, put it aside as he worked construction for 44 years then resumed his hobby in retirement.

Yet he finds himself doing less model-building these days than talking. He has gathered a small group of fellow enthusiasts who give ship presentations to schools and civic groups. And his wife has been ill, suffering from a painful leg disorder, which has occupied a large part of the retired couple’s time.

Beach is displaying his current project, a cutaway of the John Hancock, this weekend, even though it’s still incomplete after 163 hours of work.

“It’s a long way from being done,” he said. “If I were to finish it, it would take me working eight hours a day another year and a half. And I never get eight hours a day.”

In a sense, the modelers build the ships for the same reason some of the early sailors set out to sea on them. In the work comes refuge. Wicks finds his in designs from the 16th to 18th centuries.

“A ship made of wood is one of man’s greatest creations,” Wicks said. “It had to weather storms and all types of elements and yet it was a place of refuge. They were ships of war and mercantile ships, and they were absolutely fabulous, just beautiful creations.”