LUMBERTON — Dave Bullock tried to retire five or six times from work, but always found another project to pull him back into the fold.

Now that he has officially retired and moved back to his home town of Lumberton, he is still putting in hours of work in his wood shop.

This time, though, it is a labor of love.

“I got tired of doing big things so I went back to something I did 40 years ago, which is building ships.”

This particular ship, a pirate ship based off of the San Francisco II from the Spanish Armada, will be placed in a specially designed glass case at Lumberton High School. Bullock’s motivation in undertaking this project was to honor a former coach.

“I played for coach Tunney Brooks in ’59, ’60 and 61’,” Bullock said. “Due to his health problems, I had that on my mind and decided to do something special with his name on it.”

The ship, unlike most of the work Bullock has done which is completed with kits and are 1:90 replicas, will be a 1:45 replica and when completed will be over four feet long. Because of the specifications, he has had to handcraft each piece instead of using a kit.

“I was not able to use a single piece from the kit I purchased because of the scale, so I was literally creating every piece that went on the ship.”

But Bullock said that was not even the most difficult part. The most difficult thing was making sure all the little details were just right, including placing copper on the hull.

“The most arduous task is to create and apply 2,000 very small copper plates, because a lot of the ships back then had those.”

There is more to this plan than just a ship, though. The school's alumni group is also creating a scholarship in Brooks’ name to be given to students so that they may attend The University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

Donations are currently being taken with hopes of meeting the goal of $100,000 over a five-year period, and the address to make a donation is listed on the Web site for Bullock’s project, http://tunneybrooks.blogspot.com.

Also on the site, viewers can see logs and pictures of the ship in its various stages of construction.

Most of all, Bullock just wants to make sure the name of a great man is able to live on and continue to help people as he has helped others.

“To put something like that together and to put his name on it and let it stand for decades to come, obviously means more than words can describe.”