Sudan Project part 8 - Dhows

Hi Folks

Just a short post today but if you missed the last one in this series head here

One of things that drew me to the Sudan Colonial period was the opportunity to introduce river craft - specifically river gunboats and the more native sailing dhows.

As always google was my best friend here when I started to search for dhows - plenty of pictures out there but nobody to my knowledge was selling 28mm craft in resin. I did however find a russian company that produces cardboard boats and sitting within their range are Arabian dhows.

The link to the company can be found here: -

http://russia-best.com/

The website sells a variety of boats from biremes to carracks and cogs. Their Dhow was described as the following - apologies for screen grab image quality

So I decided to take a risk - with each model costiong $8 and the postage $12 I decided to buy two for a combined cost of $28

I placed the order about four weeks ago and completely forgot about it until yesterday when a parcel was waiting for me when I returned home from work.

Two flat boxes looking like this

Inside are a number of preprinted sheets of card - heavy card and very clear building instructions

Assembly of the first (excluding mast and sails took about 15 minutes with no glue needed ( Ihave since added glue to strengthen the bonds on the tabs)

As you can see from the picture below it is a waterline model - hooray

From a scale size point of view I compared one of the card figures with a 28mm mini - an almost perfect size in height

Here is the sailor on board the boat

The model does come with masts (card) and sails (paper) along with a complete rigging plan. I am going to replace the card with doweling rods (pun not intended)

So the next step is to decide whether these are going to get a repaint (they are a bit shiny) but as a cheap option for river boats for the arabian area and more importantly for all periods I think they will do just fine

more soon