I posted a few weeks ago about how pleased I was to get back one of the two wooden aircraft carrier toys that my dad and I made for my cousins' sons back in 1993, the Lexington. Yesterday I was able to retrieve the sister ship Saratoga and brought it back home to surprise Collin and Parker when they get back tomorrow.
These pictures aren't quite as good as the original, taken of the sister ships off Diamond Head in 1932, but they're close!
I still can't believe how good they look in the water. And they float just like they were designed to - most 2 x 6s (which is what they are - a selectively hollowed out 2 x 6 topped by a 1/4" piece of plywood with a 1x cut on a band saw, I think it was, for an island) just don't look this good in the water.
Both are in immaculate condition - which tells you how horrified my cousins were when I told them these were "toys" for their kids, and how quickly they probably went into storage so they wouldn't get broken. I strongly suspect neither ever saw the lake water they were designed for - we spent hours selectively hollowing the hulls out to counterbalance the weight of the island and calculating where the waterline would be so it could be painted on correctly, so they would float just like the real thing.
That, incidentally, is why the proportions are so far off - we were deliberately making stable raft-like toys that had flight decks that would accommodate the die-cast metal planes kids play with without rolling over, so the ships have very wide beams and the island structures are oversized for show. Each has arresting gear, life rafts, anchors, life boats and so forth painted on with paint markers. We could have made the turrets turn, but thought it would be better to have no moving parts to break off. I would have been more logical to make modern carriers with these wide decks, but I've always liked these two ships, especially in their bright prewar colors, and thought they'd look good.