Durham Boats for 28mm Figures

 

Durham Boats at the Washington's Crossing National Park in Pennsylvania.

We all have seen the iconic painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware River by Emanuel Leutze and nothing says the Battle of Trenton better than this picture. Therefore, I decided to make a vignette of, wait for it, Washington crossing the Delaware in one of those Durham boats.

Washington Crossing the Delaware, by Emanuel Leutze

Durham Boats have pointy ends at both ends of the vessel, which allows it to be moved in either direction whether one is traveling downstream with the current or upstream against the current. The boatmen would place the cargo in the middle of the boat (duh!) and stand fore and aft where they could either paddle with oars or push it against the current to go upstream.

I was able to find a 3D printing file of one of these boats available as a free download, and sent the file to  Akersminis to have them printed at roughly 1/56 scale to accommodate my AWI Fife and Drum Miniatures. The boats measure at about 8-inches. Alex Akers does a really fine job of printing files and turns your project around quickly and economically. I highly recommend his service. His contact information is:

akersminis@gmail.com and he also has a Facebook and Instagram page under the same name.

I was really happy with the way that this project printed. There were no air bubbles or defects of any kind on the model, as you can see in the photo below:

Durham Boats 3D printed by Akersminis
akersminis@gmail.com

The vignette as a work in progress.
Fife and Drum and some Minden Miniatures

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