GARAGE DESTROYER

Behold! Continuing and regular in-progress updates on my first ever attempt at a scratch-built 1:35 scale static waterline display warship model of a US Navy Arleigh Burke class DDG-51 [79] type destroyer. It’s taking over half my garage, measuring in at a barely manageable 4.5 meters long – 173 inches – fo’c’sle to fantail. Currently under construction in Pierce County, Washington, in the shadow of Mt. Rainier and under the occasional and random flight paths of the tight formation flying low-altitude blacked-out and transponders-off JBLM 160th Night Stalkers. This fever dream of a passion project commenced in July of 2025 by Nick Hoke, retired from a 27 year long career as a small town police patrol K9 officer. Before that there had been a military enlistment and overseas adventures in the 1980’s navy as a Leahy-class guided missile cruiser helmsman who lost a lot of sleep participating in Operation Earnest Will. Followed by a fair amount of time at Ingall’s shipbuilding when my ship was in drydock. For a scheduled refit/NTU, not because of my steering. And before all that, back in the analog days before selfies, CD’s, cell phones and microplastics, I was a teenage USN Sea Cadet at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington. That was.. uh.. ffffffuuu.. over forty years ago. So that’s my origin story in connection to matters of naval relevance and ship building here. Now it’s May 2026, month ten of my build and this challenging and fun WIP project is doing a pretty good of distracting me occasionally from the jarring reality of whatever this absurd timeline is. Therapist approved. Also cheaper. Welcome aboard to my build a boat blog.

JULY 2025

 An idea is born: Build a scale model warship. In my garage. First step was to submit a proposal to the proper authorities, of course. Permission was granted, funds authorized, and the project was launched. I started with research and development. I scoured the internet and curated a couple thousand good reference photos from public open sources. 
My presentation to my significantly better other half was basically "Hey honey I was thinking I'd like to build a model boat in the garage."  My wife replied with "Uh..okay," in a pretty agreeable tone.  Me: "Cool, thanks. it's gonna be a warship." Long silence, then she said, in a bit quieter tone.. "It's going to be big, isn't it?" 

Frankenbench was resurrected, retooled and repurposed with a bolted-on fabulously lightweight level and rigid extension ladder that gave one up for team and is now missing the top 12 foot section. By the way, if you're looking at this on your phone.. it will look so much better on a bigger screen because this model ship is just a few inches short of 15 feet long. 

There are now close to 80 of these DDG hulls commissioned and out on patrol, so there are almost enough public photos and images of them for me to find and study and reconcile different measurements and dimensions.  I say "different" because I had noticed pretty quickly that between all the ships' different refits and flights, blocks and mods and baselines and upgrades and SLEPS, every individual ship has at least one noticeably different feature somewhere; many are minor, some are major.  Built over decades now in different shipyards and upgraded in a dozen other different shipyards by many subcontractors, there is enough variance - that includes even paint color schemes and transom typography (!) - to give me a bit of leeway to relax my margin of error accuracy to roughly ±01.14% transversely and  ±0.16% longitudinally. 

You've seen those little plywood laser cut decoration contraptions things, made out of hobby plywood?  Yeah, that wood is sold in handy 12" x 12" square sheets, 3 mm thick. Just about perfect for building a boat like this. Cuttable by hand with cheap disposable utility knives. No airborne sawdust. I wound up using 13 dozen of those wood square sheets and two dozen of the knives. And five quarts of wood glue. The wood does not cut like super easy; one must apply a bit of pressure and use two or three passes to cut clean through. 

   This was Phase I: The part with all the wood. Frugality is one of my evident signature techniques. I could not find anywhere in my garage any kind of laser cutting or laser measuring machines, and there was no CAD anything. Only in my dreams. So this first phase was all done old-school Gen X style: I cut a few hundred pieces of wood and metal one at a time by hand into specifically measured different shapes to millimeter accuracy and glued them all together into a growing configuration of awkward looking weirdness that would make all of my elementary school art teachers proud. I don't know what my middle school and high school woodshop teachers would think of this.  They'd probably suggest using some jigs or clamps or something to hold the wood that I'm cutting. 

Does one need a huge area to build a ship? No, not really. I mean sure, it would be nice, but like BIW, I'm working with what I have.  

I'm not a fan of sawdust. None was generated. 

I only had to use the garage floor a couple of times.  Shout out to the floating drydock.com for the ship's general arrangements here. 

My cutting boards were whatever scraps of thick wood I could find laying around. Looking at that red box cutter I remember 47 years ago when I had very accidentally sunk one of thing things into a leg (mine) while cutting boxes for a halloween robot costume. Still my best scar. 

There was a bit of mathing and cross referencing involved in all of this. Dimensions, fractions, angles, scale conversions and measurements in both imperial and freedom units. My highest math had been algebra but I failed it three years in a row in high school. Finally in my senior year (class of '86) they let me finish with an easier business math course, taught by Mr. Arntz who had no tolerance for kids using chewing tobacco. One day he noticed a student - sitting next to me - who had some chewing tobacco in his mouth. He yelled at the kid to swallow it. The kid did. And then he turned green. I saw it. It was epic. Then he ran out to puke. High school was different back then. 

Here we see the beginnings of a fantail and flight deck. I was fortunate to have close access to a nearby print store for large scaled up enlargements of drawings. I went through a few notepads and a dozen Mirado Black Warrior pencils.  And a few band aids, because tbf the balsawood, to cut into pieces, does require a bit of pressure with sharp blades and so..yep, I did experience the occasional misjudgment of time, space, pressure.. force... velocity.... add the variables of coefficient of friction and material resistance and density and there were some slips. 

The ratio of hours worked / injuries sustained from slipped knives worked out to roughly weekly incidents that required  resetting the days since last injury counter back to zero.  

Shoutout to the shipyard CFO for setting up a first aid station next to my workbench after seeing the frequency of the slips slices nicks stabbings and lacerations to the lead shipwright's appendages. If there were two or less in a month, that was a good month. 
Both sharp and dull blades cut with equal regularity and varying severity.  Under my thumb there is a scar from a bow saw (age 12) competing with a scar from an electric chainsaw (age 17). No parental supervision - I was feral. 

If you want to make one of these yourself,  I can save you tons of time because this whole thing was a learning experience and I learned a lot. If I were to sustain a major head injury and choose to do something like this again, I could do it in half the time now that I know what I'm doing. 

You know it's not really a project until there's been some blood sweat and tears. 

Graph paper is one of the ten essentials for a project like this. And clamps. And rulers. And rolls of tape. All kinds. And markers. 

Only one injury was serious enough to require a trip to the local urgent care to re attach my left arm from the fingertip down. This was an $800 dollar bill because, you know...America. 

 As you can see, this is the first time I've ever attempted anything like this. Conforming to hull lines using basswood plywood it tricky - it's not typically recommended for planking because it has of course very limited bending abilities. 
There were methods to this madness of mine here, the main one being to "plank" on the biggest pieces I could, within the pliability threshold, and then fill in with smaller pieces. 

This wood hull doesn't have to look pretty because two (!) layers of metal (!!) are going to cover it. I know half of you are cringing hard at this photo. I get it, it hurts me too.  

Stem to stern longitudinal intercostals without general arrangement scantlings. If you know what that means you are probably also deeply amused by this photo.  
 Some of you are wondering if you could tackle a project like this... I say yes, sure you can. No prior experience is necessary.

This pic was around month two.  It was around this point that my neighbors started to notice.  

Some parts were easier than others to assemble. 

Spun sideways here just for a photo shoot. The lower hull took about a month to build, the hangers and aft deckhouse took another month, and the forward superstructure is still being worked on because reasons. Mostly related to geometry. 

Why? Why is this guy doing this? Well.. I'm afflicted with a relentlessly creative drive. This project replaced my previous hobby, the one where I was a content creator on youtube, making scenery and travel videos complete with custom soundtracks. Right around the same time I reached a quarter million views and a thousand subscribers, I realized that the rising maelstrom slopflood of AI generated video and audio (both the good and bad kinds) would be too much for me. Seeing the general enshitification of the internet going from bad to worse, I decided to pivot away from the digital world and go toward the physical IRL meatspace and make something with, as they say, my own two hands. 

It's surprisingly lightweight and sturdy.  I will admit that more than two times I had to forcefully hammer and cut out a large section somewhere due to misalignment and miscalculated measuring issues that most of you would have never noticed but it is always on my mind that there are a quarter million current and former sailors and shipbuilders out there who might notice. And I expect a few will give the finished result a critical eye, so accuracy is critical. The shipyard's lead architect and the shipyard supervisor eventually decided to both take the blame and move forward.  For your viewing pleasure I thought about including the embarrassing photos of those, uh, learning experiences but tbf they looked too much like either the USS Cole, the USS Fitzgerald or USS John S. McCain on their worst days. 

I listened to chill music and podcasts while doing this and (tried to) ignore the news; this is one of my happy places. Sometimes edibles are consumed. 

Yes, you are correct this is the wrong kind of helicopter. It's an MBB Bo 105 LUH toy that I had laying around. It's 1:38 scale, which means it's 28% undersized for this project. Auto DQ. It's serving well though as a temporary placeholder.     

The flight deck will eventually get proper 1/35 scale MH-60R Seahawk, of which there are several different kinds of model kits to choose from and a major reason why I went with this scale for my ship. 

This nice pew pew is a Takom Mk.45 Mod 4 5"/62 Naval Gun kit, in perfect 1/35 scale. How cool is this, right?  That gap at the bottom shows (my) intentional transverse deck camber because yeah, that's how I roll. 

This kit was pretty easy to build. And yes of course it will get painted. I'm still amazed this is a kit. Because I cannot find anywhere on the innertubes anybody else who has put one of these on a diorama this large. 

Aft CIWS station under construction. 

PHASE II: IT GETS METAL

Month three. One of my major goals for this model was that I wanted it clad entirely in metal, for a more authentic appearance. I tested a few different gauges and types of aluminum and determined simple rolled roof flashing from the nearest big box hardware store would work perfectly well. 

Every metal plating sheet was cut to fit, sanded, cleaned, and glued on one a time to cover the atrocious wood hull. 

November: It's month four and I still have only a vague idea of what I'm doing but the metal hull plating is definitely a visual improvement. The whole thing is a little heavier now, but still much lighter than it looks.  Now it's attracting the attention of delivery drivers. 

160 is a fictional future hull number, a homage to my career-long personnel number 610. Now if somebody serving on a real DDG sees this and wants to give me a special deck tour to let me study their ship's details in person, I would gladly renumber and configure this model to match. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Presuming that will never happen, the planned working name for this hull will be the USS CASCADIA because reasons. 

This is the under armor aluminum plating - another metal layer is going to cover all of this. And then there will be haze gray paint. And scale non-skid and railings and ladders and bitts and chocks and scuppers and VLS cell doors and QAWTD's and  just about everything else. The cordless drill was the only power tool used so far. I'm aiming to be the quietest shipyard on the block. 

I'm building this as a generic exhibition model of a Flight IIIA version, NTU mod 6.1.0 which means it will be sporting as God intended both a Phalanx CIWS forward and a SeaRAM CIWS aft; a sadly rare configuration and confirmed to me as ideal by a former DDG SWO commander who saw my model in an online forum and was suitably impressed. 
I was further encouraged by an experienced shipyard worker who saw this and told me it was looking pretty spot-on so far.  SEWIP? No! 

Surprising everybody, I managed to cut every piece of metal by hand with snips and scissors without any more blood loss. 
I did however carelessly brush up against some of the ship's sharp new corners and edges and got some impressive scrapes. So there's that. 

 Full  Metal  Jacket
FY

After agonizing about the hangars, I decided to skip all the detail inside and plan for closed doors.  You're disappointed, I know.  In my defense, I'll point out that since there will be a scale model of a helicopter hovering over the deck, authentic naval flight operations do require that the hangar doors are to be secured.  

And I know this will disappoint some more of you but this model is not designed for radio control operation(s). Because as you can see, there's..uh..no lower hull. Mostly because I have space constraints. Also a complete and properly (re)engineered hull this large with an actual metal-plated superstructure would require a not insignificant amount of ballast. In addition to running gear and batteries, all of which would need to be probably pretty well balanced. And then the whole thing would be well over 200 kg GVW. And it would then require a hoist. And a specialized boat trailer. And then at that point I'd of course have to rig the cannon to fire actual projectiles. One would really need a private AF lake for that kind of fun. Anyway, as it is now, I think this is currently weighing in somewhere around 35 kg which for a display model is quite manageable.   

This hand crafted XL scale guided missile destroyer model is apparently a one of a kind and kind of surprisingly probably the world's first; in all my research I have yet to see any other Burke class model destroyer anywhere near this stupid big or made with this construction method. At this stage it is definitely attracting the attention of people walking by outside, more than a few stop and stare and I always invite them in so they can ogle it closely. It happened enough that I put a QR on the hull so people could see my photo blog here and keep up with the continuing progress. 

When completed, this is going to either a deserving museum or a private buyer.  idk . tbd.  hmu.  nhx610@gmail.com

My goal is a museum quality model, which means this will be outfitted with a lot of accurately detailed 3d resin printed parts and pieces including the fairlead and anchor and antennas and rigging and RHIBS and radars and radomes RAST tracks and UNREP transfer station identifiers, flight deck markings, flight deck nets, QAWDs, DVSS, deck tie downs, etc. et al.   I was pleased to learn that "museum quality" is a subjective standard, and at the rate I'm going this model will definitely achieve that level. 

Any and every good boat project has to get ignored occasionally.  But I admit I did bring along on a two week Hawaiian vacation bunch of drawings to pore over and study and reconcile the visible differences between different shipyard builders and class variants. 

Score!  High quality 1/35 scale period-correct USN flight deck crew figures! This one guy is too chill though. That's okay, they'll all be replaced with better figures in a year or two. 

To answer a common question, the big prints of ships plans came from the floating drydock.com and the rest from various internet open sources. Of course the Navy does not share any of their official general arrangement deck plans or any other helpful technical details; I had to do my own research. Now that I've spent who knows how many hours studying literally thousands of saved reference photos from hundreds of internet sites, I can notice pretty quickly when the accuracy of much smaller scale plastic models of this ship class are not..quite..right. Same for quite a few of the computer 3d rendered models of these destroyers found online - virtually all of them have deficiencies in dimensions or angles or features when closely inspected. 

The navigation bridge windows here are placeholders and will upgraded. The clipboard has a scale conversion chart which I used constantly. 

There are enough different build phases overlapping now that it gives me a fine variety of mini-projects to rotate among and work on. 
  If you have questions or if you can offer me a deck tour of a DDG at Naval Base Everett here's my email: nhx610@gmail.com  

December 2025: Month six. Time for the second power tool, in this case a cheap sander to smooth out some Bondo I strategically smeared into and onto the joints.  I did not realize how hard dried Bondo becomes. Also it has an aggravatingly unforgiving cure time, especially when mixed in very small batches. 

Fifth month.  Yes a sponson will be added here for an appropriate AN/SLQ-32(V)6.

I'm replicating the framing with 3mm wide pinstripe vinyl tape, which will be then covered with 36 gauge aluminum foil - thin enough to burnish and show authentic oil canning between the frames. Or so I hope. It was the best idea that I could come up with. The entire hull is going to get this treatment because a perfectly smooth hull at this scale would be just..wrong. And so accordingly, there will also be simulated scale weld bead lines. 

Progress has slowed considerably because it's winter and now my garage is effing cold. And I have one of those new hybrid water heaters in the corner that makes hot water by spewing out cold air which is great in the summer but not so much in the winter. That's okay, I'm warm indoors gluing together stupidly small photo etched parts onto a scale plastic kit model of a sweeeet Mk 15 mod. 31 SeaRAM for the aft CIWS mount. 

This ship is going to have quite a few scale model crew figurines all over because why not. 

Everything will eventually be detailed and painted very authentically - I have a lot of prior professional experience with haze gray paint. And then it will all be appropriately weathered with simulated salt spray and aging and rust. Nothing is going to be glossy on this model when it's finished. 

Maybe I'll finish it before an apocalypse.  

January 2026 
Month Seven. It's foil time. I'm now starting to glue metal onto metal. Prep includes careful light sanding and cleaning with rubbing alcohol on the exterior of the inner plating and of course the matching inner side of the new and final cladding. For this application, I'm using a high viscosity two-part epoxy, applied paper thin to both the hull sections and the foil. I carefully apply the new metal skin, and spend a long time pressing it and burnishing.  After a couple days I carefully peel off the tape and tuck in any loose metal edges and corners with some extra superglue. 

Holy shit I think this might just work. I'm still just making this all up as I go along, powering through all kinds of interesting complications and challenges because this is uncharted waters I'm floundering around in.  But nothing good ever happens inside one's comfort zone, right? 

There will be a couple of sexy scale 1/35 RHIB's here. This one section here will need probably 20 hours of fine detail work before the boats and davits get installed.

Yay for technology in 2026: 3d resin printing! This shipment from a vendor includes one main centerline stockless anchor, and deck mooring chocks. 

Navigation bridge windows upgrade in progress. Power tool #3  enters the arena: a new cheap cordless rotary tool.  It works better than I imagined and is going to get a lot of use.  

March 2026:  Well heck my goal of getting a personal deck tour of one of these IRL has just about completely evaporated; the US Department of War has tightened up OPSEC at Naval Station Everett; USNORTHCOM Force Protection Condition (FPCON) Bravo is currently in effect. Which is probably why my dozen formal requests via phone, email, and even US Mail for an up-close study of just the exterior of a DDG have been ignored or effectively brushed off by navy officials from multiple different commands.  Maybe giving tours of ships is too woke now. So to get the fine surface details correct I'm going to have to rely on whatever pictures I can find online. 

A 1:35 scale model kit of an unmanned autonomous helicopter? Yes please! This sexy little beast is an MQ-8B Fire Scout. 

Yes, I'll paint it. Someday.  And then it will be replaced with a proper Sikorsky Seahawk.   Stay tuned..more pics are always coming. 

May 2026 - new feature: