[stately music]
- Scott Safranski: For some reason or other, I love ships.
When I get the hull formed, when I'm building,
and I start to see something
that stops looking like a bunch of wood
and starts looking like the hull,
I just think it's beautiful.
[blows air] [drill whirrs]
And we're through.
I became a reader,
and that's had a lot of influence on who I became.
You know, I didn't watch so much TV
and started reading, and, you know,
as you build models, you get better at it.
The name is Scott Safranski.
This is where I can hit my finger with a mallet. [chuckles]
All sorts of dangers in this job.
There has been blood. [chuckles]
[blows] Try not to blow it right into the camera.
You've counted all the plastic models I built,
[plastic clatters]
along with the wooden ships, [hammers]
I'm probably up around 30.
One of these days, I'm gonna probably have to either
part with a couple of them or build a bigger house.
[upbeat jig music]
It becomes a bit of a jigsaw puzzle,
and you have to think ahead.
As you continue to do through a hobby like this,
you continue to learn and make adjustments.
You know, you learn as you go, and you get better and better.
[water splashes] [cannon fire]
There are some times when you start a part of it
where you've just got to work for a couple hours
to get it done to a stopping point.
But I probably mostly do half hour to hour-long sessions,
after supper in the evening or something.
[saw buzzes]
It may seem stupid, but when you're putting planks on a ship,
if you're doing it well,
and you're getting 'em tight and all that,
that can be a lot of fun.
[upbeat jig music]
[saw buzzes]
[bright fiddle music]
The funny thing is, when I'm looking at a task,
if I'm worried about it, I think about it,
it usually goes very well.
If I'm not worried about it, I don't think about it,
I, you know, regret it.
[chuckles] It usually goes poorly, and then I do it again.
Sometimes things go wrong, and you know,
you say a lot of really bad stuff.
[chuckles] You put it down and you go away from it
for a couple of weeks.
[bright pipe music] [gulls call]
The San Felipe, which is one of the latest ones I built,
the plans were in another language.
I've never been certain what it was.
And so, I had to do it without English plans.
I had drafts, and my solution was to put 'em up
all around the room,
so that then I could look from one to the other and say,
okay, this is what it appears to be here,
but from this angle,
I can see more clearly what's really going on
and I could build it that way.
Oh, probably a pretty close to where we need to be here.
There is a story behind every one of them.
There's people who sailed them.
I'm not an engineer, but you can see the engineering in it.
And you can see the kinds of forces
it was designed to deal with and counter.
And I just think that's neat.
[bright fiddle music]