Model Balsa Wood Kits

are you sure? one of my tomb books said it. we know they traded with the santorini folks. i wonder if they taded with the new world?

yep, you're right.

confucius says women who fly upside down have hairy crack-up.

In the study material for docent duties at the Ventura County Maritime Museum, they explained that a "Balsa" boat is also a type of small float/raft made from local reeds. Some tribes of the Americal west coast used "Balsa" boats for coastal fishing. Run "balsa boat" thru google. The relationship between the boat and the wood, I still don't quite understand.

Tom

smoke it, white eyes! oops, different joke.

yep, even though it got a little dicey towards the end.

What I've heard is that the Egyptians used reeds to build their craft. And, IIRC, Thor Heyerdahl built a boat from balsa to sail west to Polynesia and pulled it off

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.

But the Egyptians also built MODEL ships. The wife of one of the guys in my model ship club is a recently graduated archeologist. Her thesis was based around an Egyptian ship model found in a tomb.

That would be somewhat difficult to do, as balsa is indigenous to South America, not Africa. They made boats out of reeds, and later pieces of wood sewn together, before Alexander The Great arrived and they went over to more modern Greek ship-building concepts. When they found Pharaoh Cheops disassembled Solar Boat in the sealed pit near the Great Pyramid in 1954, they were baffled as to why there were several miles worth of rope with it. That was all the rope the planks were tied together with. The Egyptians did make model boats also; here's some photos of of ones that have been found:

Pat

Considering what marine Teredo worms can do to solid oak hulls, I'd hate to let them loose on balsa wood. I don't how balsa trees are harvested now, but they used to just float the whole trunks down the river, with around 1/4 of each trunk being destroyed by wood-eating organisms by the time it arrived at the mill.

Pat

Want to see a neat ancient ship model? This one from the Irish Broighter Hoard is made of solid gold:

Pat

no, they had problems with the wood absorbing water. they lived on the deck the last days, very low in the water. i remember a picture and it looked half sunk.

that can float in my tub anytime.

I read the book when I was a kid. Most people don't know that balsa wood is quite heavy before it is kiln-dried to remove all the water, so setting out on a boat made of it is like sailing on a slow-motion foam rubber sponge, as it soaks up all the water again. This is probably the same with redwood, which is the stumbling block in my plan to make a

200-foot-long dugout canoe from a giant redwood tree trunk. :-) When the Kon-Tiki crew were getting ready to sail, people from the National Geographic Society told them to watch out for these things when they were crossing through the Humboldt Current: ...which they thought might try to crawl aboard at night...so the crew slept with machetes under their pillows in case they were attacked while sleeping. The jumbo squids didn't give them any trouble though.

Pat

> p/Photos/Broighter001.jpg

It would be interesting to know how much it weighs and if it really can float. The gold hull looks fairly thin, so maybe it can actually float.

Pat

In the study material for docent duties at the Ventura County Maritime Museum, they explained that a "Balsa" boat is also a type of small float/raft made from local reeds. Some tribes of the Americal west coast used "Balsa" boats for coastal fishing. Run "balsa boat" thru google. The relationship between the boat and the wood, I still don't quite understand.

Tom

them humboldts are really aggressive in the water. i didn't know they crawl in boats. they are really smart, too. the get out of tanks, traps, all kinds of shit you would think impossible.