Help wanted-boatbuilder

LITTLE ROCK — Somewhere out there is a man who can help me build a model boat for my little nephew. This man is between 82 and 84 years old, which means he was a 10-, 11- or 12-year-old boy in 1937, when the book I took the plans from was published.

I have reason to believe he knows things I don’t. I am not a model builder. But for years I have enjoyed flipping through my battered copy of the “Amateur Craftsman’s Cyclopedia of Things to Make,” a 342-page collection of model plans and workshop projects from Popular Science magazine.

I love this window on a lost world of shopclass artisans. Not that I’ve made anything in it-not the Gettysburg cannon, the bookcase aquarium, the fishing waders, the sextant, the “Small Portable Arc Furnace Easily Built of Clay and Bricks.” The plans are daunting. One of them-“How to Cut a New Entrance in Any Frame House”-frightens me.

But the boat! “A Speedy Racing Schooner,” it says. “SIMPLIFIED FOR BOYS TO BUILD.”

With Christmas only months away, did I dare? “The construction has been so simplified that 10- or 12-year-old boys can undertake the model. Very few tools are required.”

I was a 10-year-old boy once. My big project then, an oceangoing raft made from a screen door and Clorox bottles, failed. I could find only three bottles, and I knew my parents would not have allowed it near the beach.

This year I decided to make my nephew Christopher the beneficiary of my adult competence. I got the parts: plywood, dowels, screw eyes, copper wire, No. 20 brass escutcheon pins, tiny enough for the hinges on Barbie’s coffin.

The book said to make my own glue by melting celluloid toothbrush handles in acetone. I bought glue instead. I cut sides. I sawed ribs. I followed simple instructions:

“Spring the sides apart and slip the lower ribs into place at their proper stations. Set the ribs in so that the bevel begins at the edge of the side. Drive an escutcheon pin into each rib from each side. Make the inside keel from 1/4-in. square wood. Fit it inside the inside stem in the notches of the lower ribs, and spring it over to, and inside of, the stern, as shown.”

My boat is getting there. The sides and bottom planks are fitted to stem, ribs and deck beams. I planed the mainmast while watching a Dolphins game, shavings piling at my feet.

The wood part of the keel is cut but not planed. I have not yet sewn the foresail. I still need to Google the words luff, leech, bobstay, gaff, jib stay and peak halyard. I suppose I’ll be able to do the rigging. But I am nearing the limits of my ability.

Mr. Elderly Man, could you call or e-mail? At 44, I’m almost as crafty as you were at 10: I can sharpen a plane blade and use a sewing machine. I can transfer station lines to wood and calculate a stem angle. I can sand, saw and varnish.

But I have never cast a keel in molten lead.