Innehållsförteckning för November 2024 från Model Boats

All for one, and one for all So far, this series on my super versatile General-Purpose hull has featured a disco boat and Crimea gunboat/paddle warship tops, but since then a couple of other possibilities I’d been toying with the idea of have come to fruition. This month, though, to narrow things down I’ll be focusing on a single theme, but one with multiple options! The concept of a canal boat as a top came about when I was mulling over several alternatives with my mate Trevor. With a smile, he produced, from his `come in handy` box, a 4-inch-tall figure (it might have been Dr Who), which he stood on the stern of the plain deck blank sitting in my GP hull. Once we’d then put a long box…

Some time ago I was in one of the Pound or Cheapo Cheapo stores when some ‘Army Combat’ toy/model figures caught my eye (see Photo 1). These appeared to be some kind of sci-fi soldiers, and for some reason I found myself musing on the possibility of building them a boat – something around the size of my Springer Tug. So, smiling at the thought that perhaps I really shouldn’t be left unsupervised on a shopping trip, I picked them up and headed for the check out. These figures then lay around for a few months, until the dreadful coronavirus hit us. Within a couple of weeks of being virtually housebound I had the project I’d begun working on pre-lockdown finished, and, going a little stir crazy, found myself wondering…

Flotsam & Jetsam Stiletto was an historic steam yacht built by the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company of Bristol, Rhode Island, USA in 1885. Better known for its highly successful series of Admiral’s Cup racing yachts, Herreshoff’s built the Stiletto as a private venture to showcase its mastery of light weight, low-drag construction, while keeping an eye on her potential as a torpedo boat for the US Navy. In a career that spanned some 26 years, this steam yacht proved herself in both civil and military roles and, especially in the latter, exerted an influence that far outlived her scrapping in 1911. “In a career that spanned some 26 years, this steam yacht proved herself in both civil and military roles” Herreshoff Manufacturing Brothers Nathanael Greene Herreshoff and John Brown Herreshoff founded…

IN MEMORY OF Brian Perkins, 1936-2024 We are sad to announce that Brian Perkins, a long standing and highly regarded member of the model boat community, has recently passed away. Brian’s passion for modelling began in the early 1970s with I.C. powered model boats. In those early years, he also ventured into 1:8 scale glow-engined cars and became a founding member of the track building group in Wombwell, which to this day is still going strong. His interests then expanded to embrace 1:12 R/C cars at the Britdale Glass tracks in Wath-Upon-Dearne, where he keenly participated in race events from the late 1970s through to the early ‘80s. After this came model flying with gliders and glow-engined aircraft, which brought him immense joy. By the mid-1980s Brian had started his…

While sailing one of my model boats in Sheffield back in 2006, I got chatting to a fellow enthusiast who had what he explained was a Dutch vessel out on the water. The model, which he’d named Dolly Rocker, appeared to be a cross between a traditional barge and a cabin cruiser (extensive research since has yet to turn up a real-life match). Finding myself quite taken with her, I asked this gentleman if I could borrow his boat, along with the frame drawings he happened to mention he had, so that I could make a few sketches from which to build my own version. He very kindly agreed but, for some inexplicable reason, the resulting copies were then simply filed away – for the next 17 years! Recently, however,…

There are quite a few people in this hobby who can design and build interesting and impressive model boats, so it’s always surprised me that so few of them seem willing to try and get their designs published in magazines. One excuse might be that putting a design on the internet is thought to be easier and ought to reach a wider audience. This has an element of truth, but as anyone who has tried to find information on the internet can tell you, there may be ‘gold’ out there, but it’s usually mixed in with an awful lot of dross. There is also likely to be a ‘page size’ problem unless your full-sized model plan is small enough to fit onto the usual A4 piece of paper used in…

Steam Basics, Pt. 158 Wandering slightly off track in terms of the usual topics covered in Boiler Room perhaps, let me tell you about a model I constructed from the Mountfleet kit for the Ben Ain, an Irish Sea coaster, built in 1924 by The Manchester Drydocks Company in Ellesmere Port. Originally named the Doris Thomas, and then the Dennis Head, she was eventually bought and renamed the Ben Ain by The Ramsey Steamship Company in 1939. I think the story of this build (which will be told in three instalments, starting in this issue and wrapping up in the January edition) is well worth recounting, as not only are there some useful lessons to be learnt but it also gives me the opportunity to show just what can be…

Disaster recently struck. For three weeks I had dedicated my every spare moment to building a model of the Reliant paddle tugboat. Progress had been fairly rapid, as can be seen from my photographs. The paddle wheels had been made from sheet brass, bits of domestic plumbing, odds and ends, and even model railway handrail knobs. On the test rig, they’d performed beautifully, with the paddle boards feathering at just the right time. So, once I’d installed them in the hull, the electronics controlling the independent paddle wheels were sorted out and I was ready to put the boat in the bath to test their efficiency. Up until this point I’d been feeling very confident, but while the boat sat well in the water and the paddle wheels turned, the…

And now for something completely different… Having last month tackled the hull conversion, running gear and electrical installation, build of the superstructure, lighting, painting, masts, and other initial detailing, we now move on… Getting to grips with the handrails A prominent feature of the Archer class boats is the many handrails around the superstructure and the outside of the deck. The majority of these can be made from 1.5mm and 2mm diameter brass rod, and later painted to represent stainless steel. Most of my handrail assemblies were built up on the model using soft brass rod (bought from eBay as ‘jewellery findings’), bent to shape, fitted into pre-drilled holes in the cabin and soldered together. The handrail bases were simply punched out from 1mm styrene sheet and drilled to fit. Photos…