Making Tug Boats

A long time ago, in the heyday of videos rather than DVDs, there existed on TV a series called TUGS. It was made by a man who'd worked on Thomas the Tank Engine model animations and it shows. It's like Thomas on water with boats (although the morals and lessons are a little more heavy handed and grandly delivered).

My son loves it, but very few toys of it were ever produced and... well you know his proclivity for collecting whole sets. Time to get out the balsa wood and get cutting!

It was a mixed pack of Balsa from Hobbycraft which, unfortunately, didn't include the same shaped mixed pieces I've had on previous occasions, leading to much more sawing and scalpelling than when I made the previous set (did I show you those? I'm losing track of what you've seen and not seen).

Here's the first stage of roughly shaped boat. The balsa was very soft, so difficult to cut smoothly.

I found images online of the required TUGS to complete the set, then copy and pasted their faces onto a document to reduce and print out (no point making it hard for myself trying to get a likeness).

This is the basic shape most of them need to satisfy the lovely little tyrant... more detail tomorrow   = )