Made a Chinese Pirate Junk Ship Out of Balsa Wood

Having some experience in building small scale models of boats and planes, I decided, with a friend, to build a 45cm long model of a pirate junk ship. We spent overall about 250 hours on the project, and are very happy with the result ! We found a 3-view plan of such a ship online.

• 1, 1.5, 2, 3, 4 and 5mm thick balsa wood
• wooden sticks of diameters 2, 3, 4 and 5mm
• piano string of diameter 1.5mm
• miniature pulleys like these ones
• toothpicks
• walnut stain
• red fabric, black thread, some black and white fabric as well
• red paint
• outdoor varnish like this one

And some basic tools :

• a precision cutter
• a ruler
• a pencil
• paint brushes
• sandpaper
• wood glue and super glue
• needles

Note : a balsa strip cutter like this one is very useful to evenly and quickly cut the planks for the parquet and the hull. A Dremel tool with small drill bits has also proven useful.

The first step is to make the structure of the boat using thick (4 or 5mm) balsa planks. The deck is supposed to be curve-shaped so we had to bend it and glue it in place.

Then, we made the details (barrels, railings, stairs...). This step was the longest as it involved many trials-and-errors as well as a lot of precision. We had to work almost esxclusively with tweezers.

As a first try, we glued small 1.5mm planks on top of one another to make a stair. The result was bulky and unsatisfying (1st pic).

We then found another solution by setting two long planks with needles and gluing the steps between them. There is 1.5mm of free space between each pair of steps. Once the glue has dried, the needles can be removed and the result is a stair that feels "much lighter".

The first step is to cut two small circles and a slightly bigger one and glue them with 3-4mm between them to make a barrek structure. Once the glue has dried, we cut very small and thin planks, dipped them in water to soften them, and glued them on the structure using super glue.

After some trials-and-errord, we found a good method which was to use bits of toothpicks as railing uprights, and a 2mm thick hand railing glued on top of them. This combines very well with our stair design.

I asked my grandma to sew some small merchandise bags as well as the sails. We then sewed wooden sticks on the sails because that is one of the distinctive features of junk ships.

We wanted to do something realistic for the floor of the deck. So we cut dozens of small planks of different lengths, stained them using different concentrations of walnut stain. We then glued them on the deck according to a ramdomized pattern. This yields to a heterogeneous and quite realistic pattern.

The back stairs are a bit skewed so we had to build them in-place instead of separately. The medhod remains more or less the same : glue the side planks, and then glue the steps one by one while making sure that 1.5mm separates each pair of steps.

We then cut a few dozens of 1mm thick planks, stained them and glued them one by one on the hull structure. We used super glue for this step as the planks have to stay bent while the glue dries.

The next step was to color the boat using walnut stain and red paint. This was relatively easy except for small details like the name of the boat which had to be handpainted on the back using a needle dipped in paint. By the way, the ship is named after a famous chinese female pirate who ruled up to several thousands junk ships, Ching Shih.

The final step is to use cotton thread to attach all sails and pulleys on the masts.