The Matchstick Man

For all those modellers who have at some stage cursed warped plastic hulls , shrunken resin and fiddly photoetch.... Take a step back ... and view and honor the lifetime achievement of Phil Warren which is simply breath-taking...A modeller of a high enough standard to be asked by the Royal Naval College to make models for presentation to the Royal Princes has a vast collection of ships and aircraft, all to the scale of 1:300, and with functioning details such as gun elevation and rotation, folding of wings and spinning rotors on the helicopters. The staggering thing is that all these models are made from matchsticks and matchboxes and nothing else, although you would never guess this from the superb finish he always manages to achieve. His toolkit contains a steel rule, a pencil, razor blades, pointed & flat tweezers, abrasive papers and a few pins!
My thanks to Phil Bauman for his avid description.


Phil Warren from Blandford Forum in Dorset UK has since completing constant scale first ship model in 1948 been adding continuously to his matchstick fleet so that the collection has now burgeoned to over 500 different ship models.... ALL BUILT ENTIRELY of the material of a MATCHBOX.... All the ships are of the worlds navies POST 1945-- which makes for interesting viewing to see survivors from the WW1 Royal navy... The Ships of the Royal navy make up the largest part of the collection, there are however numerous models of the the US Navy, the Russian navy, the French navy with representatives of Spain, Italy, Germany and all the Commonwealth navies. Each and every model, both ships and the many hundreds of aircraft are all handmade to a constant scale of 1/300 using nothing else but the matchsticks and the wood from the matchboxes. Absolutely no other material is used...!! All painting is done by hand, squadron markings and numbers are all done without transfers....- this alone is mind boggling! Phi's fleet can be seen at most of the major UK modelboat shows.

My thanks to Phil Bauman for his avid description.

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Travel & Events

Tags:

• matchsticks
• model
• Phil
• Warren
• ships
• aircraft