This small boat was sold as a souvenir at one of countless "T-Shirt/Bikini/Souvenir" shops on the Mississippi Gulf coast. A number of similar vessels are available in the $2.50/$3.00 range. I purchased two of these for $3.00 each several years ago for conversions to light gunboats or utility ships. It was painted in a garish glossy green and white finish and the details were a bit rough, but I thought it had possibilities.
The original boat with netting for trawling still intact. Brightly colored and quite shiney!
The Original label - still on the hull bottom!
My wife thought that it had possibilities also and hijacked one of the vessels for home decoration uses. I did a simple conversion on the remaining boat. I erected a gun shield forward out of a small piece of plastic sheet, scored bent into angles with the corners trimmed off. Then I drilled a hole for the gun mount. The gun itself is a mix of brass tubing and old railroad parts out of my scrap box but any lethal looking 15mm gun would work. It pivots on a base made out of a pushpin. Some small metal part from the scrap box was glued atop the pilothouse to break up the flat blankness of the roof.
A new smokestack was made of brass tubing, glued over a small nail hammered into the wooden block superstructure. I painted the boat in a medium gray scheme and dry-brushed a bit of rusty brown over the hull and superstructure. I left the original white rigging in place and painted it black with diluted Testors' flat black. There is a very small dowel that is the original exhaust stack on the boat. I left it in place, but the new stack allows me to stuff a bit of cotton into the tubing to represent a "smoke plume".
My gunboat operates variously as Bolshevik, interventionist or white. A Peter Pig naval machine gun team fills the space between the cannon and the pilothouse on occasion for more firepower.
The gunboat steaming upriver through an almost-frozen river at a game played at FUSILIER MUSTER in Hattiesburg Mississippi.
Return to the Jackson Gamers' Homepage
Angelfire - Free Home Pages
Free Web Building Help
Angelfire HTML Library
htmlGEAR - free polls, guestbooks, and more!
Thank you for visiting The Jackson Gamers' pages at Angelfire. Please come back and visit again!