USS Fort Wayne 512
The USS Fort Wayne under way on open water, dressed overall with signal flags, hull number 512 on the bow.

Fort Wayne, Indiana · Built 1984

A battleship built in a garage

Twenty feet of quarter-inch plywood, painted battleship gray, with a Chrysler blower motor for an engine and room inside for exactly one captain. Steve Leuenberger drew it on paper, built it in three months, and spent the next dozen years sailing it up and down the rivers and lakes of northeast Indiana.

She is not a model

The USS Fort Wayne is a boat you climb into. The superstructure slides back, the captain settles into a carpeted seat below deck, and the whole thing closes up again over his head. From in there he steers with a four-switch control box, swings the gun turrets on cables, works the spotlights, sounds the horn, and talks to shore on a CB radio.

To scale she is a heavy cruiser, though she borrows her lines from destroyers and battleships both. Steve built her from his own sketches rather than a kit, and added to her every year after that.

See the full specifications and the builder's diagram

Aboard

Explore

  • Steve Leuenberger seated in the open cockpit of the ship, waving, with signal flags strung overhead.

    The story

    How a canoe and kayak builder on Stellhorn Road decided to build a warship instead, and what the neighbors on the riverbank made of it.

  • The bare hull of the ship strapped to the roof rack of a Dodge Omni in a driveway.

    The log book

    Test runs in 1984 and 1985, then 94 logged voyages from 1986 to 1996, across roughly 28 lakes and rivers. Every one of them arrived by car top.

  • A model railroad layout showing a town square with a courthouse, shops, vehicles and a steam locomotive.

    Trains

    The ship is not the only thing Steve built. A town square, a courthouse, and a steam locomotive to run past them.