Cork boats for weddings

One of my friends says that my life seems a bit "random" sometimes. She's right. A few months ago, I received a request for some cork boats for a wedding.

After a little e-mail discussion, I  found myself having agreed to make up some for Matt Cox and his bride to bes nuptials. They were to be used as table decoration, sailing in goldfish bowls on the tables.

Matt had spotted my posts about the Cokyn-Baba boats we tried a couple of years ago at the boat club. The wedding was to have a nautical theme and so I was the man to decorate the tables!

Anyway, he required 8 boats so I set about acquiring materials. The hulls are cork sanding blocks cut in half and shaped by hand using a surform. Beware if you try this, not all blocks are the same. Cheapo ones from Wilkinson are less dense than pricier versions from a proper hardware shop.

The original sails were from very thin plywood, supplied cut ready to use by a gentleman who wrote the models up in Marine Modelling magazine. I didn't have and couldn't find such thin and stiff wood so 30 thou plasticard was substituted. It has the advantage of not needing painting. The sail sizes were taken from my original boat but I rounded off the corners a bit as there would be children and drunk adults poking these things and at the time of manufacture, one council had deiced that triangular flapjacks were a potential deathtrap, so I thought "better safe than sorry".

The keels had also been supplied in the past but I made my own from a bit of sheet steel in the garage. Some aviation snips and a bit of filing did the job followed by a coat of Smoothright so they matched the sails.

All done, the boats were passed to a relative who was going to the event. Admittedly I interrupted a game of petanque to do this but it was cheaper and easier than posting. A few weeks later, I received some photos showing the boats in use. Apparently they went down very well. In fact one of them was purloined, so who knows where it has ended up?