Hull
- Framing
- Poplar keel and bulkheads
- Planking
- Double-planked: first layer poplar, second layer ebony
- Below the waterline
- Copper plates, cut one by one from sheet copper
- Deck
- Planked in maple and stained to simulate the real deck
The Story
Sixteen years in the making
George Lowery spent 16 years and more than 3,235 hours building this model of USS Constitution by hand. He began it on September 27, 2005, and completed it on November 22, 2021, working on it on and off between other projects.
This is George’s third Constitution. The ship was his first major project: when he retired from the police department, his colleagues gave him a Constitution kit as a retirement gift. While building it, he traveled to Boston to photograph the real ship. He later sold that model to a collector.
After a second trip to Boston, George scratch-built a second Constitution. Its cannon barrels were cast in silver.
Both of those models were built from an older set of plans that were not fully accurate. While the Constitution was in dry dock for a refit, the ship-model company Model Expo commissioned the shipwright Ben Lankford to draw a new, more accurate set of plans: the Model Shipways plans.
For this third model, George combined the older plans, the Model Shipways plans, and photographs from a third trip to the ship at the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston. He scratch-built it in a larger scale, as accurately as he could, and again had the cannon barrels cast in silver. The hull is coppered below the waterline, just like the real ship, whose copper sheathing protects the wood from shipworm and barnacles.
“Each time you look at it you discover something new.”
George is now 85, and he is still building.
