August 23, 2006: Former coal miner builds scale cruise ship in his back yard

Many thanks to bargalunan, who noticed this item and remembered us!

Men build stuff; it's what we do. Somehow, it's a natural tendency; it's in our dreams. Sometimes one of us follows through on the dream.



François Zanella was a coal miner in Lorraine, France. He would sometimes build model boats.

Then he decided to build his own dream, a 1/8 scale replica of a Royal Caribbean liner, the Majesty Of The Seas. 33.50 meters long, 4.75 m broad, 6.60 m high.

He first conceived of the project and started drawing it in 1993; began construction in 1994; and finished it in 2005.



Much of the project is documented in French, and with very small pictures, on Zanella's own site; another related site thankfully offers an English version, which gets me more information than Babelfish translations.



Zanella got a lot of help from a lot of people who heard of the project - and he's now met a few of the real Royal Caribbean cruise ship captains too. As far as I'm concerned, he's the real Captain. Hats off to this gentleman and to all gentlemen everywhere who set off to build their dream.

so, um, now what? does the town now become know for having the "world's giant-est cruise ship model"?

and i wonder if it floats...

Sometimes, when I see people like this guy who has this life-long dream and then goes on to make that dream a reality, I wonder, "What kind of weird life-long dream is that?"

Now he just needs a BIG fucking bottle to put it in.

He launched it.
Pictures are kind of small.

I believe it's already in the water. See

http://bateau-francois.site.voila.fr/18a/index.htm

I get a lot of sappy stuff in my inbox from various relatives, but just yesterday I got an email from a friend purporting to be from Dave Barry titled 16 THINGS THAT IT TOOK ME OVER 50 YEARS TO LEARN.

Number 3 was:
There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness."

I'm not sure why, but I thought of that email just now.

Quote:

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce Hell no, it's got a crew.

Any minute now, he's going to have to deal with a real small fire, a little bit of food poisoning, and a mild case or two of Legionaire's Disease.

Damn.... and I have a problem vaccum cleaning the carpet. My cover's off to this dude.

Length: 33.5 m = 110 feet
Width: 4.75 m = 15.5 feet
Headroom: 3.5 m = 11.5 feet
Draught: 1.06 m = 3.5 feet
Weight: 90 tons in fresh water and 96 tons in salt water.
Two 100 hp engines
Two 38 kw stem propellers
160 m² living space = 1722 sq/ft
60 m² upper deck = 646 sq/ft

And the bottle of Champagne to Christen it.

Brings to mind that line from Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come."

Um...am I to understand from the specs above ("living space") that this is *not* a functional scale model, but one which is actually intended to be operated as an inhabited recreational vessel?

I think that's correct. It looks pretty nice inside too. This thing rocks!

It is pretty darn cool. Hell, I'd be proud if I could build a rowboat, let along a 110' motor vessel.

Watching this man on TV : it's fantastic to realise how a crazy and personal dream can merge so many people around him. (Like Forrest Gump).

His neighborhood isn't even spiteful after years of din.

But the Displacement is the actual total weight of the ship.
If the density of the water varies,(warm, cold, fresh, salt) what changes is how far the ship settles into the water. But, the weight of the water displaced will always equal the weight of the ship.

Because Archimedes wouldn't lie to us, his oldest and dearest friends, I've no idea what they meant by the two weight figures.

It must be that when they take it on the ocean, the sea anchors they have to take along weigh an extra 6 tons.

Maybe it's not the weight of the ship itself, but the amount of weight it can carry.

From the English link;