Most mornings, Peter Nolan dons a striped plastic apron with six bulging sewed-on pockets (for calipers, tweezers, cutters, goggles) and enters what he calls the “controlled chaos” of his 340-square-foot commercial workshop in Decatur, Alabama.
There, in the company of Bud, his Gordon Setter, he has been known to spend 80 hours in a week sketching, carving, sawing, and painting pinpoint replicas of modern ferries, tugboats, lakers, and container ships, made from scratch in N (1:160) and Z scale (1:220).
Projects sometimes begin with Nolan walking through a shipyard and photographing a boat he likes. “They’re all beautiful,” he says, “especially the ugly ones.” He needs only the bow-to-stern measurement to convert the remainder and draw every part (sometimes more than 5,000) on his iMac. He prints many of these on semi-pliable sheets of styrene thin as a fingernail, using a digital die cutter, and he applies his own glue formula. Nolan fashions each gun, winch, booby hatch, motor, and life ring from wood, brass, or cast resin, save for a few repurposed materials: Tulle makes great fishing line, grommets serve as portholes, and masts are slender paint brush handles. Completed ships, sold on his website (often to Scandinavian hobbyists), run from $5 for a ¾-inch cast-resin rescue boat to more than $20,000 for a commissioned museum piece. For the Houston Museum of Natural Science, the six-foot-two-inch Nolan spent 12 hours a day for 90 days building a seven-foot-nine-inch, 175-pound fiberboard model of the TI Oceania, the world’s largest oil tanker.
Nolan started out building N-scale railroads as a hobby 44 years ago. In 2001, after laying 1,100 feet of track in his garage and creating five truss bridges and dozens of surrounding factories and restaurants, he realized he had space for a harbor: “I built a fleet of freighters, and never looked back.” The one-time English major, who wrote for BCM’s precursor, Bridge, worked in public relations before retiring in 2008, at the national laboratories in Los Alamos and Albuquerque (where he designed and built his home).
“I’m not at all patient,” he says, “just persistent” in the face of finicky curve-to-scale calculations and submillimeter adjustments in the interest of accuracy. When he gave a 26-inch, haze gray, Gleaves-class destroyer to his 89-year-old neighbor who had served on one in World War II, it released a “stream of memories” in the ex-sailor: There was the (styrene) bridge where a gale gust offed his hat, and the depth charge racks (of photo-etched brass) where the hat was found.