Indholdsfortegnelse for October 2025 i Model Boats

I like building vessels with character, historical significance and/or local interest here in Cornwall, and I’m back with another obscure but, I hope, interesting scale boat project from the pandemic years. In Falmouth there is a long history of passenger ferries which ply many times a day throughout the year across the Carrick Roads to the now rather exclusive village of St Mawes on the Roseland Peninsula. Most, over the years, were locally built in wood, and the ‘Duchess’, the last addition to the fleet, was no exception. She was launched in 2008 by her namesake, Camilla, the then Duchess of Cornwall, and the then Duke of Cornwall, HRH Prince Charles, now our Queen and King. I am told, however, that there are no plans to re-name the vessel. The…

This month, courtesy of The Airbrush Company, we’re delighted to give you the opportunity to win the Iwata HP-C PLUS. Offering total control when fine detail spraying, this state-of-the-art airbrush is loaded with innovative features. It boasts a generous 0.24oz/7ml fluid cup, ideal for colour mixing. It has a quick, flush, cutaway pre-set handle that allows easy access to the needle so that you can quickly empty the paint reservoir for cleaning. This preset feature allows you to set the spray output, thereby enhancing control while reducing finger fatigue, while the spring-steel needle resists breakage and the PTFE needle packings are solvent-resistant to ensure increased longevity. Included is the Iwata Nozzle Spanner that is used to remove the nozzle for cleaning and Iwata Lube with which the head needle and…

OUT AND ABOUT Illuminated regattas – a sparkling start to autumn! Between 4pm and 9pm on Saturday, October 4, 2025, Bournville Radio Sailing and Model Boat Club will be hosting an illuminated regatta on its lake at Valley Parkway, Bournville Lane, Birmingham B30 1QS. What’s more, between 4pm and 6pm visitors will be welcome, under the supervision and guidance of BRSMBC members, to try out the club’s ‘have a go’ yachts and model boats for themselves. There will be no admission fee, but anyone wishing to sail a model boat of their own will need to sign in – this can be done in advance online by visiting the club’s website at https://www.bournvillebrsmbc.com/ Likewise, and also on October 4, the Crowborough Model Club will be holding an open to all…

Fairey Marine Ltd was a boat building company set up in the late 1940s by Sir Charles Richard Fairey and Fairey Aviation’s MD, Chichester-Smith. It was based on the River Hamble, Southampton. At this time Sir Charles clearly had a few bob, as he acquired Shamrock V, a J Class yacht that had been built in 1930 for Sir Thomas Lipton, the tea magnate. Both Fairey and Chichester-Smith were keen sailors and between them hatched a plan to produce ‘affordable’ sailing dinghies using techniques employed in the aircraft industry, which both were well acquainted with. They gathered around them experts from the two relevant industries, aviation and sailing. Peter Twiss, a hero of mine, joined in 1960. You may recall he held the world air speed record at the time.…

One thing that seems to catch newcomers out, and which can end up being very frustrating, is the process of painting the lower hull of a model to the correct waterline. This might involve simply the demarcation between two colours, or it might involve the inclusion of what is known as a boot topping. The boot topping is the stripe down the side that separates the upper hull colour and the lower hull colour and, itself is worthy of a little consideration. One of the most basic concepts to get your head around in the first place is the fact that the separation between the two hull colours nearly always follows the waterline. This is because the paint applied below the waterline has to have significantly different properties to the…

While I try to ensure that the subject matter of the Boiler Room articles remains fresh and interesting, there always seems to be one or two topics that recur quite frequently during pondside conversations and so perhaps merit revisiting occasionally. The obvious one is ‘The Rules’, but rest assured we’re not going there again this month. I consider myself very lucky to have gone through a marine engineering training system in the days when the course content really was superb, and we enjoyed the luxury of looking at many and varied associated subjects. One of these was tribology. The name immediately commanded our interest! While there are many definitions of tribology out there, a fairly accurate one is ‘the science and engineering of understanding friction, lubrication and wear phenomena for…

In the late 19th Century, the potential effectiveness of the Whitehead torpedo paved way for the future of a new type of vessel which combined the qualities of great speed and small size with a weapon that could destroy a battleship. The famous Thornycroft company was renowned for producing fast boats such as the launches Miranda and Gitana, and in 1876 it persuaded the British Admiralty to place an order for its first torpedo boat; this vessel would be called HMS Lightning. Later in life it would be designated TB-1 (Torpedo Boat 1). It was armed with a singular torpedo tube mounted on the bow of the boat, with two reloads sitting on cradles located amidships on deck rails. The vessel, 87.5ft long with a beam of 10.75ft, was powered…

40 years ago, my father and I built a three-masted schooner, the Sophie Williams, based on a then commercially available fibreglass hull for the Porthmadog Schooner M.A. James and corresponding drawings by David MacGregor. This took to the water in 1987, was written up in Marine Modelling (Marine Modelling 59, February 1992 pp4648), and was then sailed at various locations over the intervening years, with a few modifications made along the way. In late 2023/early 2024, she was completely refurbished, and it was this that gave me the boat building bug again. Eschewing building my own hull, I settled on the West Country Trading Ketch hull from Orion Mouldings. This appealed as it appears to be the same scale as the Sophie Williams, 1:32, and would allow me to create…

The definition of ‘barges’ in the English Dictionary is “to hurry and push through rudely, or a flat-bottomed boat – from the French ‘Baris’”. So, let’s push on rudely with this article… In the May 2025 issue of Model Boats, a reader’s letter expressed the desire for a barge, or barges, that his model tug could pull. Well, barge kits are out there. I know of at least two manufacturers, Mobile Marine and Deans Marine, offering these. But, when it comes to towing barges in multiples, there are some factors to consider… At a recent boating event I watched a tug towing a string of three barges – with difficulty, the model looking like a duck being followed by its wayward, oversized chicks, or perhaps a loosely segmented dragon. Not…

Calling all Kakos The Kako family of small electric motors arrived on British shores in 1958 from Japan and immediately became popular as a low-cost alternative to traditional British-made motors, such as the Taycol range. Seven motors made up the range, from the ‘01’ at 3s 11d (three shillings and eleven pence pre-decimal currency) through to the hefty ‘5’ at 31s 6d (thirty-one shillings and six pence). All had a similar arrangement of two Alnico V permanent magnets carried either side of a cylindrical tinplate centre body enclosing a three-pole armature, but in the case of the ‘4’ and ‘5’ the bent-tab construction gave way to a much more serviceable nut and bolt arrangement, with the ‘5’ even able to boast replaceable carbon brushes. Although clumsy and cheap looking, these…