In his peaceful home in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, Gérard Rialland watches over his fleet. Not an air fleet as those nostalgic for the stillborn airport project might think. No. Gérard Rialland is at the head of an armada of boat models, all made by him.
Originally, the Landais was a professional welder. He started his career at Polysoude and over the years he became a demonstrator in automatic and manual welding. A job that allowed him to travel abroad, notably to South Africa.
700 hours of work for the 1/48 “Hermione”e
But it was in Nantes, in the 2000s, that his passion for naval modeling came to him. While he was still active, he discovered this hobby by visiting a model exhibition at the Beaujoire exhibition center. He cut his teeth with one of the Pen Duick by the navigator Éric Tabarly.
Since then, he has specialized in arsenal models.
These models originally replaced the plans. They have the particularity of being closed on one side and open on the other, which allows you to see the interior of the boat
explains the sixty-year-old.
Retired since 2005, Gérard Rialland has produced a dozen of these models to date, including theHermione, the frigate on which Lafayette embarked in 1780 to lead a secret mission to the United States and provide French support to the insurgents at war against the English. The model is on a scale of 1/48e.
A job that took the modeler no less than 700 hours. And as he likes to say, “ It’s winter work, from the end of September to the end of March, five to six hours a day.”
It is in the heart of his workshop, among the different machines, that he assembles his pear wood models. Over time, he found his own tricks, such as bending wood using a pressure cooker. And he even made, using a small electric motor, a small machine for making ropes, using linen sewing thread.
His models bring joy to the members of his family and the lucky owners to whom he agrees to sell them.
