Frank Hill displays the "Victory," one of his most detailed model ships.In 1955, Betty Sue Hill gave her husband Frank his first model ship building kit: Christopher Columbus' famous Santa Maria.
Hill then started out building model ships from kits and eventually began crafting his miniature wooden ships from scratch.
He has completed 24 ships in total, eight of which are permanently on display at Signal Mountain Library.
He describes his most recent donation, "News Boy," as his best yet.
"My objective is that each one is to be the best one," said Hill.
Two years in the making, the ship was intended to be a gift for Eddie Reachard, whom he met while coaching granddaughter Mary Claire Spann in tennis.
Reachard had a model ship as a young boy, which he and Hill talked about fixing up as they became friends. Hill was working on "News Boy" to give him as a gift, but Reachard passed away before its completion.
"I have always liked the romance of the sea, particularly the sailing ships and the history of them," said Hill of the reason he gravitates toward model ship building. "I like to work with wood and make them from just a pine board."
He purchases model kits for the plans, the size of which he typically expands by at least two times. Hill takes 1-by-12-inch boards about 4 feet long and stacks them to form a solid block, which he then chisels out to shape and adds the planks.
"I put every plank on the ship," he said. "They look very crude at first."
One of Hill's more intricately detailed ships is the "Victory," a model of Admiral Nelson's flagship in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1804, which features 104 cannons and lots of tiny windows. He visited the actual ship in Portsmouth, England, as he was in the area, to do research for his model.
"The rigging is the hardest part," he said, which is about one-third of the work involved with building the ship.
One-fourth of the job is the painting, all of which is done by Betty Sue Hill.
"It's a joint effort," he said.
While still working as an engineer, Hill said his better ships took him five years or more, but now that he has retired the ships usually take him between 18 and 24 months to build.
Hill never sells his ships, only gives them away to friends and family or donates them to the library, where he said he enjoys having the ships.
"It's a good place for the children to come and see the ships," he said in regards to the library's collection, three of which are replicas of Columbus' Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria, the latter dedicated to his wife on their 50th wedding anniversary.