Sunrise future sailors
The final frame from the movie "Paradise Lost" (1994). Everything is clear here without words, but the modeler needs to pay attention to the shape of the sail
Let's all go on the road together!
We've been away, too long!
Many are waiting for us in calm seas!
Let the north wind blow!
Let the sea rise and fall
And sends forward our canoe!
Polynesian song
We've been away, too long!
Many are waiting for us in calm seas!
Let the north wind blow!
Let the sea rise and fall
And sends forward our canoe!
Polynesian song
Culture and creativity. Almost everyone who read and commented on the article about a trip to Easter Island liked it. And among others there was such a comment:
“... how much do we know about domestic ethnographers and travelers. Most will be able to name only the stars of the century before last Przhevalsky, Semenov-Tyan-Shansky and Miklukho-Maclay. From the pioneers of the last century, under torture, you can squeeze out the names of Papanin and Chelyuskin. Fans of Thor Heyerdahl and comrades from the USSR, having scratched their turnips, will “give birth” to Senkevich, and a third will confuse him with Drozdov. Without cuts, about Polynesia, Oceania and about. We know more about Easter than about our native Mansi, Evenks or Mushers.”
I don’t know how anyone, but in my opinion, everything is written very correctly. But what needs to be done to arouse among our fellow citizens, and above all young people, an interest in knowing the world around them, how to create our new Maklaev, Przhevalsky, Semenov, so to speak, Tyan-Shansky?
Well, it is necessary that children not only stare at screens, but “read the right books” and, of course, be properly brought up from early childhood. By the way, one of our readers also wrote about this in his comment ...
Such a Kon-Tiki raft (only not on BF glue, but on “white” PVA) can be made even with a three-year-old child. Moreover, make it as a New Year's toy by painting the "logs" in elegant yellow, although brown is also suitable. The mask of the god Kon-Tiki can be drawn with felt-tip pens on light brown paper soaked in strong tea and ironed. Four threads for the edges, then one common with a loop and your family raft can be hung on a Christmas tree. Parents quite often make New Year's toys with their children. Why don't they do this too?
About the fact that “children need to be taught to play”, there was already material here, and more than one. And about homemade ... But homemade homemade strife. And you can always think of something to do with a child, so that he can develop his hands and brains, and ... "make" him fall in love with the romance of distant wanderings, and so that later he would be quite ready to become a "navigator of the sunrise."
Here it is - the legendary "Kon-Tiki". Thick logs can be made from pine bark (it is easily processed), thin logs can be made from kebab sticks. Keels, oar blade, mast and steering vest fasteners - ice cream sticks or coffee bags glued with PVA glue under pressure. Ropes - severe beige threads
That is, we play - we master, we master - we read and tell, and again we master ... playing. Fortunately, there are also time-tested samples of homemade products, just for this approach and oriented. True, here I will have to make a small digression, however, having a direct connection with the topic.
Let's start with the fact that I learned about Thor Heyerdahl's visit to Easter Island quite early, and not from books, but by watching the scientific and educational film "Aku-Aku". When it was? Well, somewhere after 1959, when a TV set appeared in our family, and a TV tower in our city of Penza. And then, of course, there was a book about sailing on the Kon-Tiki and an immediate desire to make a model of it.
The raft of the Incas proper is made using the same technology. Since the logs on it are hewn, it will be possible to take sheet foam suitable for scale, cut into strips of the desired length and ... wrap them in paper and glue the paper, and after the “logs” (2) dry, they will need to be painted with acrylic . Platform (9), mast (4) and rail (6) - sticks for barbecue. But keels (1) are best made from lead plates, for example, fishing sinkers flattened with a hammer. Their number is determined empirically. The rest are wooden, painted with acrylic in the color of metal. They must have weight, otherwise the raft will be too light, and the wind will be able to overturn it. Sail (7) - fabric, and always red!
It's funny that I was lucky to be born in the same 1954, when another navigator, William Willis, along with the cat Mickey and the parrot Ekki, set sail across the Pacific Ocean on the raft "Seven Little Sisters". Or rather, when he set sail on June 24, I was not there yet, but when 115 days later he moored to one of the Polynesian islands, I was already there!
Tamil raft. By the way, they called it kattu-maram, connected logs. From this came the name catamaran!
And this is Willis' raft of seven large balsa logs, hence the name. In the figure shown here, everything seems to be clearly enough to make it a model. The cutter at the bottom is a tribute to the Soviet era. Then such cutters had to be made by yourself. Now a model knife is no longer a problem to buy.
So it was destined for me to make models of rafts, and in my childhood I really made a lot of them. But then I read about a boat from Lake Titicaca, wanted to make it and did it, and then showed it on our Penza TV and inserted it into one of my books for children on technical creativity.
The author on one of the programs of the Penza radio. Television recordings and photos from 1980 to 1991, unfortunately, have not been preserved. However, the entourage in both cases is very similar, only on TV on my table there were still tools and parts of this or that homemade product, which was supposed to be “born” during the program in exactly 30 minutes and not a second later
The model of a totoras raft from Lake Titicaca is probably the most complex and time-consuming I have ever had to do, although looking at the drawing you would not say this. What's the catch here? And the fact that the cigars from which the raft was knitted should be made from iron-ironed straw - straws stacked on adhesive tape one to the other. The work is very boring. You can also string them with a needle on a thread, but this is even more difficult. A four-layer mattress is wrapped in a bundle thickening towards the extremities. You need two thick ligaments and three thin ones. One in the middle between the thick ones, and two are the sides. The sail is also made of straw, and here you can’t do without a thin needle (from a thick one - straws crack) and thread. It is very difficult to bend the ends. You have to do this with an electric soldering iron wrapped in drawing paper (you need to make sure that it does not char, like straw), and at the same time moisten the ends of the ligaments with water and fix them with stretch marks
It's not that I'm lazy by nature, but I don't like to work hard. Therefore, after experimenting with straw totoras, I decided to make Thor Heyerdahl's vessel "Ra" out of plastic, toothpicks and kebab sticks. And did!
And, as you can clearly see from the picture, you can make it together with your son or daughter of seven or even ten years in just a couple of hours. Although, of course, it will be a desktop model. Then I came up with the idea to make a construction set for children based on this development. But with the certification of it as a product for children, there is too much trouble. And the production itself is not for me.
Model "Ra" made of plastic - you can't imagine it easier!
Then I began to be interested in ocean rafts, in addition to the famous Kon-Tiki and Seven Sisters, and it turned out that there were not just a lot of them, but a lot. So many that it turned out to be quite possible to write a book about them, and even advise in it how to make their models. But ... it turned out that in the USSR of the 80s such a book was impossible for a number of reasons.
But it is possible now, and suddenly, well, purely hypothetically, one of the readers of VO will take up this topic and deal with it? Practical assistance on this path from my side will be guaranteed ...
Here's another raft for this book: Tahiti Nui 2: The ocean raft of 65-year-old Eric Bishop
I foresee the question: where is Tahiti Nui No. 1, did it really exist? There was, yes, of course, but ... since we are here, first of all, we are talking about homemade products, then only those rafts that are not too difficult to make were chosen as prototypes for them. For Tahiti Nui-2, I sawed square-section slats on a microcircular saw - here's a raft for you. But with Tahiti Nui, alas, this will not work, and doing it may not be so difficult, but tedious. And I don’t like “boring” models and homemade products.
By the way, here is another very funny Native American raft of ... pumpkins! Poppy heads were used instead of pumpkins. In Soviet times, it was quite a “normal recommendation”, but today it is best not to show interest in such “boxes”, since such “interest” may be shown to you yourself that it will not be interesting at all!
Pumpkin raft. If you make a set for mass production, then "pumpkins" can be made from thin sheet polystyrene, stamping halves for gluing using the "vacuform" technology
Well, this homemade product is also for the New Year. A boat that can be hung on a Christmas tree. What is it made of, you see? From my favorite jars of Yantar cheese. It remains only to increase this scheme to the desired size, and you can cut out the parts and glue them together. However, that's not all…
If you invite his young comrades to your Christmas tree to your not too “old” child, then take care to make such boats from your “child” in secret. And paint everything in different colors. And then, when the children at your place want to have fun, arrange steam boat races for them, with throwing a die, advancing along the floor by N cells and stranding (“skip a turn” if zero falls out!).
Children will be just delighted, and then you just present these boats, and they will remember this New Year's miracle in your house for the rest of their lives. True, I didn’t arrange such races for my daughter or granddaughter, but it was different that their guests also remember to this day.
A piece of pine bark and a ficus leaf dried between layers of paper, and you can become the owner of an exotic model of a catamaran, with a sail of a typical Polynesian design. How to make this model is quite clear from the figure, only the third stage of its manufacture using an electric burner is outdated today. In Soviet times, it was easiest to “hollow out” the hull of a canoe model from the bark. It was only necessary to work outside in windy weather so that the harmful smoke was carried away by the wind.
You can't work from home like that. But it doesn't need to. Just today… When through AliExpress you can easily buy a portable model drill with a set of emery nozzles and with their help you can easily remove all unnecessary bark. A mask on the face so as not to breathe dust, glasses on the eyes, and the included vacuum cleaner either for dad or his son in the hands - to suck out the dust that forms, and ... that's it! You will receive a ready-made hollow body without much labor and time.
The skeleton of the sail is bent from a thin copper wire, painted black and glued with superglue (do not give it to children: one boy worked for them in the summer in shorts and, out of excitement, squeezed out the whole tube on them, but did not have time to run to the bathroom in time ...) on dried ficus leaf. Then everything is cut off along the contour, and the ficus leaf (now it's already a sail!) Is covered with a layer of PVA glue or colorless nitro-lacquer.
Polynesian catamaran with two balance beams and a crab claw sail
Using a very similar technology, a model of the Malayan “flying proa” is made from the bark ... Again, all this was drawn back in the USSR in 1990. And then no one was surprised by the recommendations to make a microchisel yourself from a pen for writing (see the figure on the right below)
"Flying Proa" from Micronesia
A curious feature of the proa was its absolutely incredible design.
First, the asymmetrical body: flat on one side and convex on the side facing the balancer.
Secondly, the balancer itself is made of solid, non-floating wood, best of all iron!
Third, the hull was symmetrical at the bow and stern. The sail could be deployed in any direction and the steering oar ... just moved. They sailed on it like this: the crew tilted the hull to the flat side so that the balance bar barely touched the water, and, catching the wind, began to move. For some reason, the narrow asymmetrical hull made it possible to reach speeds of up to 21 knots or more, so even mail packet boats were overtaken on the move.
Of course, they required a large crew (half sleeping, half tilting the hull!), Great skill, but it was not at all a problem for the Polynesians to cross the Pacific Ocean on such a ship!
This picture shows "leather" and wicker boats
And they are shown here because, in addition to Thor Heyerdahl, William Willis and Eric Bishop, history navigation on reconstruction ships, another person also entered: Tim Severin, who, for example, traveled from the Faroe Islands to Greenland on a leather boat "dried apricots". The ship he sailed on was called the Saint Brendan.
Make a model of St. Brendan" can be done by cutting out its foam body. But it's much smarter to use its design features to teach your child how to solder! That is, to solder the skeleton of this wire boat and then sheathe it with thin skin. Brown, waxed leather, light gray tarpaulin bleached by polar winds, lots of wooden “warm details”, bright red Celtic “crosses in a nimbus” on the sails - all this will give your model a completely unique appearance. Well, the story about Tim (Timothy) Severin himself and his voyages ... There are so many romances of distant wanderings in them that there is more than enough. And that's exactly what we need, right?
A very simple model of pies can be assembled from skewers, toothpicks and ... brown sticky tape. The skeleton of the pies is assembled according to the pattern, after which it is pasted over with this tape, first from the outside, then from the inside. Outside, it is not necessary to compress it so that it does not get pressed between the frame rails, but from the inside, so that there are no voids in the skin, you can squeeze it. You can also paste over the frame and strips of leatherette. Sail - application: black patterns on white paper
These “souvenir pies” made of wood look great...
Only the volume of wood from the inside should be chosen not with the help of an electric burner, as shown here, but with a micro-drill with emery nozzles. The finished body of the model inside should still be burned a little with a lighter, after which both the outside and the inside of all its parts are covered with a colorless model nitro varnish. On this cake, a deer skull is glued out of paper. But you can, of course, mold it from plastic.
Well, and finally, if you already have a baby in your family who has access to only plasticine for the development of creative forces, make a ship out of plasticine with him (it’s best to take a strong and dense sculptural one!), And not just a ship, but a model that can swim in your bath!
By the way, you can paint sculptural plasticine with automotive nitro enamels. But is it possible with acrylic paints, alas, is unknown. In Soviet times, they, unfortunately, were absent, but there were aerosol car enamels that could be used to paint such models using paper stencils.
Our drawing shows a model of a tanker, since the publishing house demanded a “peaceful ship”, since “we are fighting for peace”, but the same principle can be used to make battleships, battleships, and even slightly diving nuclear submarines ...
To be continued ...
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