HERMOSA — Wayne Kusy's arsenal includes wire cutters, glue, an X-Acto knife, sandpaper and hundreds of thousands of tiny pieces of wood.
The 55-year-old Kusy's battle: creating ships with toothpicks. His latest victory is a 14-foot replica of a trans-Atlantic ocean liner, is made up of 270,000 toothpicks and 10 gallons of wood glue.
The project, his seventh major ship, took an estimated two years of eight-hour work days to complete.
The replica SS America (1939) debuted over the weekend, at Black Couch Gallery, 4200 W. Diversey St.
"I like the details and everything," Kusy said. "There's just something about it. I don’t have any degree in architecture or structural engineering or anything like that, so everything I figured out on how to keep it structurally sound was basically toothpick engineering on my own.”
Kusy, who grew up in Rogers Park and has spent the last 13 years in Lincoln Square, builds the ships off actual deck plans, blueprints and mechanical drawings matched with photos and videos of the full-sized ships he finds on YouTube.
The S.S. America was completed in Kusy's apartment and took up both the living room and dining room until it was shipped to the gallery last week.
It took 18 hours to wrap and ship and put it in a custom-built box to make its way from Lincoln Square to the gallery.
The move from the third-floor apartment to the transport van took more than an hour, but wasn't nearly as tough as a previous 25-foot-long ship.
"That one was nerve racking," Kusy said. "It took a full three hours to get that thing out of there."
The ships are an act of engineering that Kusy has mastered over his lifetime.
His obsession with creating model ships dates back to a fifth-grade art project where Kusy and his classmates made art from everyday materials such as dried macaroni and popsicle sticks.
At the time he was also building model World War II airplanes at home and decided to combine the two hobbies, first building boxes and sculptures out of toothpicks, then small houses and eventually his first ship, a clipper when he was 11.
In high school, Kusy dropped the hobby, but not for long.
"I thought it was kid stuff, but it wasn’t until I got back in college and they started looking for the real Titanic that all the sudden I got inspired and started building the Titanic," he said.
By day, the ship builder codes websites and other programs, which he says is very similar to building a boat.
"If you make a big application that could be a hundred thousand lines of code — 100,000 toothpicks," Kusy said. "You have to have the same tenacity, you’ve got to have the same discipline and keep the thing going even if you make mistakes.”
Kusy has only sold one of his ships, but a number of others are in museums around the country.
His 16-foot model of the Lusitania is on permanent exhibit at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. Others are in the Stan Hywett Museum in Ohio and at the Philharmonic Museum in Naples, Fla.
Kusy's ships have gained him international media attention. (The U.K.'s Daily Mail called him "a stick-ler for detail.")
Kusy's next ship will be the NS Bremen, a German liner that gave Americans a legal way to drink during Prohibition.
"I've been choosing my ships because of how they ended up," Kusy said. "They have to have some kind of angle to it. It can’t just be a pretty ship and famous ship. It's got to have something unique about it that I like."
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