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AN ARGUS SPECIALIST PUBLICATION DECEMBER1987 £1.30 A. wa “15 arda; ad po a =e ~ is rd Win | erican Steamboat i Pa] LE iy) s | ry ; ” Be : NARS i Sy . : a) oSTs Sal | ~ Mi ‘i ; z a! u $e. z F i , – a Smit Nederland Tug Plan Feature in controlling the cost and performance of the class. In a clarification, it was agreed that the ban on plastic spars did not prohibit the use of plastic jointing fittings and bearings in swing rigs used in the class. In the 6-m Council agreed with the thrust ofa Bournville proposal to limit hull materials, as in the full size 6-m Rule, but preferred to control the development of the Class by imposing a minimum hull weight. Alternative motions will be discussed at the AGM. If carried, the restriction will become a local MYA Rule and will be recommended to IMYRU for general adoption. In the one metre class, the MYA has no jurisdiction over boats being built to a class that is not yet recognised by either the MYA or IMYRU. Nevertheless, it was decided to urge on IMYRU the adoption of the form of 1-m rule recently adopted by Naviga, which incorporates a minimum weight clause. The MYA has written to all known producers of hulls to the rule, advising them of this preference for keeping the class simple and cheap. National Radio Championships: In future, the system of racing used for National Championships must be one that includes a substantial element of fleet racing in which the top boats are sailing each other, particularly towards the end of the Championship. Ranking Races and District Championships: It was agreed that for next year District RM Championships would not be Ranking Races. The idea is to preserve the District meetings as a first step away from club competition for the average sailors and to avoid frightening them away with the prospect of meeting the hot shots intent on wringing the last available point out of their day’s racing. Unrecognised classes: The present position is that the MYA will consider for recognition a class that can show 50 boats sailing in at least four affiliated clubs. With the appearance ofa number of commercially produced small radio controlled yachts, such as the 590 and the Challenge 12-m from the Harvey Middleton stable, some clubs are beginning to accumulate small groups wishing to sail these smaller boats. Oxford has a group of 590’s and ran a National Championship for them during the summer. There’s going to be another one next year. Council decided that the MYA policy should remain as it is at present but that clubs should be urged to offer help, facilities and encouragement to those who wish to sail these classes, so that they are given every opportunity to accumulate a critical mass and seek recognition, if that is what the skippers MYA News The September Council meeting dealt with the usual full agenda and produced more than the usual amount of follow up work for the Secretary. The main issues of general interest were: Strength: The total of members affiliated through clubs has risen over 1,000 for the first time in many years. There are about another 100 divided between individual members and the Vintage group, so things are looking up and we are beginning to see a return on the effort that has been put into publicity over the past few months. New affiliations in the last few months include South Shields, Black Park (Denham, Bucks), Sandwell College and Kingsbury Water Park. Constitution: A series of tidying up amendments to the Constitution were approved. They will be put to the AGM in December. The main thrust is to eliminate the proxy vote and to rationalise the arrangements for postal votes. ‘M’ Rule: The new rule was approved by IMYRU in July. As soon as it is available, each club will receive a copy. The new rule makes changes of significance only in the way in which sails are measured; half and quarter widths will be used to control the roach on sails. The actual limits in the rule have been drawn so that most existing boats can continue to sail with very small amounts trimmed from the sails to meet the new template method of measuring the upper and lower ends of the leach. One side effect is that in future measurers will be required to sign and date sails when they are measured and therefore a register of club measurers will be needed. Details have been sent to all clubs in the recent Acquaint. Limitation of high technology materials: Council looked at the possibility of controlling the use of carbon fibre and other ‘exotics’ in the hulls of three classes. For the 36R it decided that it was too late to impose restrictions and the horse was now out of the stable. The restriction on C/F rigs remains, and is much more significant DECEMBER 1987 involved want to do. Pictures this month from the Southwold Mode! Yacht Regatta. Top: not handsome but quick to build and quite effective. Middle: schooner rigged Southwold boat. Reaching performance is important in Southwold races. Going downwind the main boom is unshipped and the main is depowered. Bottom: beach yawl model with aft deadwood much deeper than full-size. Commercial interests: There will bea discussion, without a motion at the AGM on the merits of seeking to exclude from the administration of the sport those who have a commercial interest in the supply of equipment. There are problems of degree and definition here, as well as the risk of losing good administrators. Management of World Championships: Council decided to urge IMYRU to further amend the Directives for the running of World and Regional Championships (which they only just agreed in July!) to try to eliminate the problems over passive 689 observing that were discussed last month in the context of the R10-r Worlds in Sweden. Berlin 1988 The arrangements for the joint IMYRU and Naviga World Championships for the RM and R10-r classes are now firm and the programme is as follows: Friday 19.8 Arrival and registration. Saturday 20.8 Arrival and registration. 09.00 hours — Opening Ceremony. 12.00 hours — Junior RM Championship. Sunday 21.8 Senior RM Championship. Monday 22.8 Senior RM Championship. Tuesday 23.8 Senior RM Championship. Wednesday 24.8 Senior RM Championship. Thursday 25.8 R10-r Championship. Last therefore, not be mounted where they will get the full benefit of everything that washes across the deck. They share a common philosophy of aiming at a less than top level performance and a less than top level price. The solutions they have adopted are slightly different. The one marketed by Maritime Models of Greenwich is aimed at the scale sail market and is fairly powerful and fairly fast. It has a beefed up gear train and offers a very satisfactory performance. day for RMs. Friday 26.8 Senior RM Final and Prizegiving. R10-r Lay Day. Models. The other new winch is marketed by Kip Marketing, Chris Jackson’s company, trading out of Reigate. It is called the ‘Mistral.’ This one is aimed particularly at beginners in model yachting and offers reliability above all else. It uses the existing SLM gear train. The speed is noticeably slower, about 6.5 seconds for 3.25 turns. This avoids putting too much stress on the skippers to get a day’s sailing in good company. The closing date for entry will be at least three months before the start of the event and the number of places for each National Authority is going to be small, probably three or four in each class, unless there are large scale dropouts from the and Junior events will be filled by a selection committee of the Chairman, Vice Chairman and Secretary of the Association. Those interested in attending should get their bids in as soon as possible to John Cleave. New winches There is a continuing problem over the supply of winches through the model trade. Winches designed specifically for top flight competition have very high performance, light weight and fairly high prices, but in general are not available from your friendly neighbourhood model store. The alternatives that are widely available are the Futaba and Sanwa lever arm winches, which are admirable in their way, but of relatively low power. Otherwise there is only the Futaba drum winch which weighs a ton and is very big and noisy. All three suffer from the effects of the rising Yen and about 7.5lb. The larger and smaller drums give different trade offs between distance and power. It can be used either directly into the receiver or with a separate power supply. One curious feature of the early example I have been testing is that the last quarter turn of any movement is made ata very slow creep. It gets there in the end and the power and accuracy of the movement are not affected. It causes no problem with the vintage 10-r I am using it in at present, but could be infuriating in the middle of an RM race. Peter Lewin assures me that the main production batch are not like this. This winch retails at £68.50, and is at present available only from Maritime Saturday 27.8. R10-r Championship. Sunday 28.8. R10-r Final and Prizegiving. You will see that, in deference to Naviga practice, there are to be one day Junior championships in each class. I’m not sure at present exactly where the cut off point will be drawn on age, but this might give an opportunity to some of our younger more distant locations. The entry fee will be DM80 (currently about £27) per boat. MYA places in the RM event will be filled from the order of the RM Ranking List for 1987. Places for the R10-r The time to run from full in to full out (3.25 turns with my Futaba gear) is five seconds (no load). This is not as fast as the top of the market competition, but it’s not bad at all. The trim adjustment gives a further .75 ofa turn. The winching distance with the middle size drum is 10in. and the stall load gears. I have not had time to do measured tests on the sample but the power is adequate for the job. It comes wired toa plug ready to be connected directly to the receiver. The cost is £49.50 and it’s Top: the beach yaw! model’s hull formis also fuller forward than in the original. The rig is a dipping lug on the fore and standing lug on the main. Right: Francesca, probably the oldest boat on view. ‘Sailor built’ with hull form not unlike a bawley. Below: another oldie, beautifully planked to a double ended canoe design. The finis almost certainly a later alteration. Possibly once a class boat to the 36R rule. are painfully expensive for what they are, particularly if, as for some scale sail applications, you really need two winches. I have recently had two new British made winches for test which are aimed at filling the gap in the market that exists fora winch of moderate performance matched with a moderate price. There are considerable similarities between them. Both use the well known SLM black moulded case; both use the standard SLM drums and are available with a selection of three sizes to choose from. Both weigh in at 5o0z and both have cases that are not guaranteed to be waterproof; they should, 690 MODEL BOATS Buoy WIND a LP Pe = but may go into model shops as well if there is a sufficient demand. are the norm. Southwold This does not mean that the boats or the racing are unsophisticated. The regular visitors and their families take it seriously I think I have mentioned Southwold in passing before as an example of seaside resort model yachting. In Edwardian days there were two competing series of regattas organised for the rather upper crust visitors to this small Suffolk town. One was run on a pond near the ferry to Walberswick by the local council; the other was organised on a pond at the other end of town by the Pier and a very wide range of designs are still in use, some dating from the early years of the century and looking it, both in design and construction, others clearly influenced by ‘real’ model yacht design at every stage since. This is not surprising, as a number of the regulars have links with the more organised model sailing that we all know about. Geoffrey Pout, long active in the ‘A’ boat fleet, is credited with no less than 55 designs to the Southwold Rule over the years. There are also a number of one offs that appear to bear no allegiance to other schools of design. The more recent boats Development Company, who also hada larger heat sizes aré the norm, possibly even a mass start. Classes are determined by overall length (which ranges from 15 to DECEMBER 1987 Finish goal between flags 36 inches) and by the age of the skipper. No rudders are used and simple out and back reaching courses across the square pond available at present from Chris Jackson, paddle boat lake as well as the attractions of asmall pier. There was an entry ofa penny for each boat and it seems that the whole thing was designed for the children. Model Engineer carried occasional reports of the summer activity in the years before 1914 and on one occasion printed a photo of a regatta with a host of boats being sailed by little boys in sailor suits, watched by their admiring parents in blazers and straw hats, long white dresses and parasols. The boats at that stage were largely produced by the local fishermen as a winter occupation and sold to the gentry as they arrived for their summer holidays. I don’t know when the pre-1914 style of organisation stopped, as there have been no substantial reports since then, only occasional mentions on the grapevine and in ‘MYN’ that made it clear that something is still going on there. I had heard from various sources that there was now an organisation drawn from among the regular summer visitors that puts together a concentrated series of races during August each year. This year, I made contact with the organisers, Southwold Model Yacht Regattas, in time to decide to go down for the one day in the year on which they were holding the ‘adult’ regattas. On that day there were something in the region of 50 or 60 boats engaged in the three separate competitions that were run off in the course of the afternoon. Racing was in four boat heats on a knockout basis. As in the past, most of the races are laid on for the children visiting the town, and I think that in these races Starting marks are in GRP or balsa and some have Top and above: boat influenced by American ‘M’ designs of the 1940s; huge rig. Next down: another up-to-date approach. Below: this could be a standard 36R of the 1960s or ‘70s, even to the sailmaker’s mark. The drawing shows the Southwold course. Typical technique – average best course shown dotted to windward, full line downwind. Solartex decks and swing rigs. Sails range from homemade from an old sheet to the latest Mylar from well known sailmakers. I saw one example of a boat closely modelled on the beach yawls once typical of the Suffolk coast and used for servicing the commercial craft offshore with water, provision and pilots. The most famous beach yawls were owned by the Beach Companies, run as worker’s cooperatives and specialised in salvage. There were models of this type in the Lowestoft club in the 1880’s and I was pleased to see the tradition continuing. Unfortunately, by the time this particular example came to sail the wind had almost disappeared, and I had no chance to see whether she would reproduce the fantastic reaching speed that the type was credited with in the centuryold reports that I had read. The adult regattas included a much more difficult test of sailing skill, the ‘beat and run’ course. As will be seen from the drawing, the course requires the rounding of a mark set against the windward bank and a return to a defined ‘goal’ on the bank from which the boats started. With no rudder, and with a requirement that the buoy must be rounded in the correct sense only and wrong shots must be ‘unwound,’ there is a very high premium on knowing exactly what the boat will do with small variations of trim. If the boat is trimmed to go to windward efficiently, there are real 691 windward under her full rig, but was a little off the wind whenI took the topsail and jib topsail off her. Sailing her off the wind was not a success, as might have been expected given the lack of any rudder and the big mainsail. The design and construction are interesting. The hull is pressed tinplate, screwed to a substantial plywood deck. The large fin is aluminium sheet and bolts onto the hull. It carries a moderate sized piece of lead and she would carry her rig well in much stronger breezes that she was tried in at Southwold. She is labelled ‘The “Ailsa” Yacht, a Milbro product, made in Scotland,’ and I think that she is a product of the 1940’s or 50’s. The gaff rig I have given her is pure indulgence, as there is no evidence that she carried one originally. There was provision for a bowsprit and it seemed right to give her a miniaturised version of the typical pre-1914 ‘Solent Rig,’ together with a pair of light weather sails to make her look even more traditional. One problem with a boat as small as this is the need to simplify and miniaturise the controls. Apart from the standing rigging and the sheets for main and jib, which use existing screweyes in the deck, there are no bowsies. Sails are retained by passing the ends of sheets and halyards under small strips of problems in going downwind. One skipper, sailing a schooner, unshipped the main boom to depower the rig on the run. Most trimmed for a fore reach to windward and came down in a series of broad quartering sweeps, designed to place them in the right position to quarter reach into the goal from a reasonably close range. The course is designed to put a premium on tactical placement of the boat rather than on pure speed or windward ability. For instance, if you sail close to windward you end up at the top of the lake on the wrong side of the mark and have to go back to havea shot at rounding it from the right side. This applies whichever tack you start out on and could only be avoided by a very finely judged guy, which they don’t seem to use at all. The course remained the same even when the wind swung through 180 degrees and posed even more problems in getting to the right position by a dead run from the start. It was much more difficult than it looked and I don’t think that next year, when I intend to have a go myself, I shall have had enough practice to compete with the regular members, many of whom have been going to Southwold for family holidays and sailing boats there since they were children. masking tape on the spars. It works fairly well and is a lot neater than bowsies and loops all over the place‘ While we’re on the subject of avowedly toy yachts, a photo of a “Triang’ model about 24in. long. There is the remnant of a ‘Triang’ transfer on the transom. She is past any sort of restoration and is included as an example of the application of mass production techniques to models. She is made, both hull and deck, from compressed paper or fibre board about ‘4in. thick. The hull is formed into a flange which is joined to the flat deck. The construction means that there can be no sheer. The exact production method eludes me, but could be hot wet pressing from separate sheets of the base material, or possibly even a hot press from a finished sheet of board. The board must have had some protection from the wet other than the paint on the outside, but it’s not clear at this distance in time what it was. At any rate, it has long since failed and the board is warped, delaminated and generally finished. The paint is flaking off and looks pretty much the worse for wear. The fin is wood and there is a fair sized bit of lead built into the bottom. There was a rudder once and a Braine gear quadrant still remains. I would have dated this one to the late 1940’s or early 50’s as well, but perhaps one of my readers remembers these boats in their heyday. ‘Evaine’ One of the photos shows Ailsa ina dignified and impudent pose with my latest acquisition, Evaine, an RA dating, in her present form, from about 1970. The hull is ‘Ailsa’ I was however pleased that an 18in. toy yacht that Richard Howlett had acquired and I had rerigged with suit of sails cut from plastic bags sailed straight off the drawing board. She made good progress to 692 Top: Ailsa, a Milbro toy yacht of the 1950s? Next two pictures show a Triang model in fibreboard. The radio installation is on Evaine, an RA from 1970 MODEL BOATS sails for at least three of the boats. They all will need a vast amount of canvas anda range of alternative topsails and headsails, so let’s hope I have time to do something else as well. Other vintage boats Just to finish with, photos of two boats that came to rest on the sofa in my study on consecutive days in August. The first is an ‘M’, origins unknown, picked up in an auction for a knock down price because some of the planking in the fin was stove in. WhenI first saw her at Clapham last year there were bits of newspaper stuck to the varnish inside that seem to suggest that the last time the deck was off was very early in the war. The design is typical of first generation (pre-1939) British practice, and is similar in general concept to Daniels’ Pocohontas. The planking has been repaired now and there are several coats of varnish on her, so she is beginning to look quite shiny. Apart from her relative rarity — there were only about 100 boats in the class when the register was closed down in 1940 as a result of the war — she is interesting for the way in which the planking is carried right down the fin, as would be the case in a full size planked boat of this hull form. The second is a 10-r which from her style I would say was of similar date, the late 1930’s. She is 69in. loa and only 10in. beam. the last ‘A’ boat that Bill Daniels designed shortly before his death in 1959. She was originally a full keel design with the rudder mounted on a raked sternpost. The building was completed by Arthur Levison and the boat was sailed under vane for some years. Later, the fin was substantially altered, the rig modernised to use a larger jib and radio fitted by Ted Porter. The radio installation is by Dr. Ricks, about whom I know nothing, but who was clearly a power in the land in those days. It is finely engineered in Perspex and works well, with a proportional rudder and progressive winch operated by a pair of micro switches. I shall write more about this boat when I have had a chance to sail her. ‘Nonsuch’ Another boat of imposing presence is the 10 tonner hull illustrated in the photos. She was acquired by Richard Howlett through the antique trade and will be called Nonsuch after his company. She is 7.75 in the beam, which would give a lower water line of a little under 40in., quite moderate proportions, but she is a fearsome sight and weighs very heavy for a 10T. Apart from the scoring on the starboard bow that can She came to her present owner after be seen in the photo, she is in near perfect condition, despite being in the region of 100 years old. Richard hopes to have her sailing by next summer, when there should be at least two other similar boats on the water. Richard Wolnough’s Jolanthe is well advanced in her restoration and Mike Burn has taken delivery of a new hull built to Albert Strange’s Cupid design of 1891.1 am hovering on the brink of having a 10T hull built for me as well as it looks as ifIam now going to find an original for myself; then we shall have some real vintage sailing. It looks as though I shall end up making the DECEMBER 1987 Above: Nonsuch, a 10T from about 100 years ago. The depth of the hull is the only excessive aspect of what is otherwise a very moderate design for the period. Below: ‘M’ class hull of pre-1939 vintage. Bottom: 10-r from mid Wales. Again before 1939 in design and build. Very narrow for her period and a nice example of bread and butter construction. All photos: Russell Potts. languishing for many years on a property in Dolgellau in mid Wales, where she was reputed to have been originally the property of a Colonel Ruck. The hull is bread and butter and has started to come apart and been reglued at least once; the deck is a piece of one eighth pine, which dates her quite clearly to before 1939. The beam is very narrow for the period and the displacement is therefore relatively light. There is a full complement of deck fittings that have been removed while the hull is refurbished. They are of high quality and suggest that she was originally a serious racing boat, though where she was raced remains uncertain. Dolgellau cannot have been her home base if she was in serious competition. Contact address: R. R. Potts, 8 Sherard Road, London SE9 6EP, Tel: 01 850 6805. 693
