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The Miniature Man MOLDEU MAGAral MYA News Money The June Council meeting dealt with two major topics of interest to all MYA members. First and most important is the discovery that the Association is, suddenly, very short of funds. Council was able to identify the main cause of this, a higher net cost for the production of the Yearbook than had been the case in previous years and to take steps to avoid the same thing happening again. Nevertheless, the value of the subscription income has been eroded by inflation since 1982 at a much faster rate than the increase in total income through the rise in affiliations. A package of short term economy measures, reducing the size of Council meetings and cutting down on administrative costs, was agreed and proposals for changes in the Constitution to reduce the scale of District representation on Council will be put to the AGM at the end of the year. There will also be proposals to increase affiliation fees and individual subscriptions by 100%, to £4 and £6 respectively. Even the new figures are very low in relation to what most model yachtsmen spend on the other costs of their sport and represent an increase of only 11% a year since the rates were last revised. Since 1982, the quantity of work and the output of paper required to keep the MYA running and to play our part in the international administration of the sport have increased very markedly, and I hope that there will not be too many quibbles about the scale of the new subscriptions. Organisation Quite independently of the financial issue Council considered the way it organises itself and its business. There has been a feeling for some time that the Council is too big and unwieldy to handle its work effectively and a number of Top, Chris Dicks’ winning boat, Magick. Right, Martin Roberts’ Zit. Below, Armando Betancor’s Canarito hard pressed downwind. tentative schemes for change have been mooted. It has now been agreed that a proposal will be put to the membership that will effectively halve the size of Council. The number of officers regularly attending will be reduced to the Chairman, Secretary and Treasurer, together with a Racing secretary and a Technical (rating rules) secretary. Other officer posts will continue to be filled by election, but their holders will attend Council only when necessary. District representation will be reduced to one from each District, in place of the present two. The second representative was introduced in the early years of the growth of radio yachting, to ensure that both vane and radio interests could be represented from each District. The need for this dual representation is now thought to be much less and reductions in the size of Council will enable it to deal more effectively with its work, as well as reducing the cost of Council meetings. Rating Rules There has been a bit of a kerfuffle over the “A” Class Rule. Last autumn, the Canadians circulated a series of proposed amendments to the Rule that would have permitted interchangeable rigs and prognathous keels in the class, together with a consequential tolerance in the weight clause of the Rule to accommodate the different weights of smaller rigs. The MYA Emergency Committee considered this and voted against the two substantive changes, while offering our own local variation of the weight clause, which we introduced some time ago to deal with the impracticality of weighing boats to the accuracy specified in the Rule. MODEL BOATS Left, Emile Serveila and Gilles Vuillemin. Below, Eddie Crockford’s Treen, an Anagram in varnished finish. measures and OOD’s with a reasonable degree of reliability. Rule of thumb may be exactly what we get, as the most promising route looks to be an agreed sample of a material which can be compared with the test piece by simply pressing it with the thumb. All this work arising from a single word and affecting an issue which all concerned agree is probably not of great importance. In the 99% of all boat to boat contacts which are glancing, almost any bumper will be sufficient to prevent injury. In the 1% of cases where the contact is full speed bow to broadside, no bumper of any form or material, short of making the whole front end of the boat from foam, will begin to absorb the energy involved. What a tangled web we weave. RM Nationals As a result of an administrative error by IMYRU we only heard very recently that we alone had voted against the changes and that they were going to the IMYRU PC in September for ratification. The “A” fleet in the MYA, which is just short of an absolute majority of boats in the class across the world, regard this as a dangerous step, a tinkering to no purpose with a rule which over the past 66 years has produced a highly competitive class capable of containing boats of widely differing form and concept and allowing them to race on level terms. The Rule has not imposed a type of boat and has been able to accommodate changes in construction technology without needed changes in the Rule. The development of the lightweight displacement penalty vane “A” boat has been achieved without any need to alter the Rule. We see no need to make minor changes whose benefits are far from clear, but whose effect on the cost of remaining seriously competitive in the class must be severe. Two or more additional carbon fibre rigs will be needed. It is our belief that the other nations voting who, with one or two exceptions, have negligible numbers of boats and very slight experience of design and competition in the class compared to that within the MYA, have made a serious error of judgement. If the PC cannot be persuaded to reconsider this change it is very likely that MYA’s AGM will be faced with a demand from those who sail the class that the MYA continue with the old Rule. It would be hard to refuse and would be no skin off our nose as our boats would continue to rate under the IMYRU Rule. Much as we enjoy the visits from European vane “A” skippers to our Championships, the losses we should SEPTEMBER 1988 lle suffer from excluding boats with multiple rigs or prognathous keels from MYA events would not be significant. “M”’ Rule The brand new “M” Rule from IMYRU has, as might have been expected, been found to create problems as fast as it solves them. The decision to include a requirement for a “resilient” bumper has immediately produced a confusion over definition. Measurers are giving boats certificates and OOD’s are saying they don’t have resilient bumpers. “Resilient” means capable of deformation and of regaining its original form when the stress is removed. Steel is resilient (to a degree and in certain circumstances). So are almost all materials. That’s not what they meant, they meant that it has to be soft like silicone rubber or rubberised cork, not hard like natural cork or incapable of recovery like balsa, said the Emergency Committee when asked for a ruling before the RM Nationals. That won’t do either. Some boats had natural cork bumpers that were patently softer than some of those made in rubberised cork. That’s right, most materials come in a range of grades of softness and if they are man made are produced to closely defined standards. So what we want isa definition that relates bumpers to the international Rubber Hardness Scale? Well no, because this works by applying standard tests to standard samples; it can’t be used on a bumper sized piece of rubber, still less on a finished boat. A sub-committee has been sent away to look at samples and decide what is soft enough to meet the “resilient” requirement and, more important, to come up with a rule of thumb test that can be applied by I didn’t get to sail at Gosport because I still haven’t finished the new RM. Correction, I haven’t started the new RM yet; there always seem to be more interesting things to do and the prospect of all that work for the hassle of competing with people who want to take it all so seriously is not attractive. So I was only there for the Sunday to discover that the wind, though strong enough to have caused several retirements already, was distinctly unhelpful to Graham Bantock who as Race Officer was trying to set a sensible course. There were 50 entries of whom 45 actually started and figure on the result sheet. Racing went along at a brisk pace and most of the skippers had a good time. The result was a win for Chris Dicks who was lying third after 9 races with a score of 26 and finished up after the full tally of 17 races with only 25 points. One more discard admittedly, but a near perfect performance in the latter part of the meeting. Second was Martin Roberts, who was sailing exceptionally well when I was there in the middle of the meeting, but fell away a bit towards the end. Otherwise the results at the top end of the order look much as you would expect, with the exception of Mike Weston of Swanley and Mark Sidey of Three Rivers who made welcome entries into the big time. The foreign entry was smaller than we had hoped earlier in the year with Emile Servella and Gilles Vuillemin from the Arc-en-Ciel club in Paris placing well and the Canary Islands contingent, reduced to Enrique Ferragut and Armando Betancor, finding themselves well down the field after a number of breakages and other acts of God. I had the impression that the consistently heavy weather was all a bit too much for them. Technical points of interest were relatively few. There were two or three boats sporting Bantock unstayed conventional rigs of the type I wrote about a month or so ago. Roger and Peter Stollery were using refinement of the Stollery style of swing rig. This involves a pivot for the main boom that gives a very restricted range of movement. The effect is to let the swinging arm move further between tacks, thus pushing the jib up to windward and giving a near perfect parallel between main and jib booms. The idea is very simple and the execution in a 515 is also few carbon fibre mouldings took may I to pho The ard. forw straight contrast to make t on however be a bit shorblac on black doesn’t a good illustration, erwkise the strangest Oth . well h rap tog pho “X-Ray”. or’s Tayl n Joh was looking boat transparent Left, Peter Stollery’s Frizbee, showing the articulated main boom fitting which gives a better relationship between the jib and the main. Below, a drawing of a West Hartlepool 15 Tonner of 1907; taken from The Model Yacht Club Guide and Directory. Bottom, Peter Stollery’s Frizbee in small suit and going very fast. ing or a The hull was moulded in car bon fibre tows resin and left visible the the very up beef to used n bee had that le I was there she light construction. Whi ting burst of speed was showing some exci finishing position downwind, but her fina’tl get through the didn she that ests sugg a few races. meeting without losing Vintage e something This month I want toofwrit history of the the es stag r late about the . They had a Rule 30” “17 10 Tonner to the in the North East long drawn out decline s some and produced in their later year typical The . boat of es styl liar very pecu to have ms see ner Ton 10 “plank on edge” heyday of the been universal during’sthe class in the late 1880 and early 1890’s, K wi .C. 28t P.B. &Y M. nal scores afte MODEL BOATS “Lady Gray”, a 15 Tonner from the Hartlepool club. The fin and bulb form is very “modern” in concept, as, for its period, is the rig, though the hull form and fixed rudder is already archaic. Boats essentially similar to this appear in photos of the 1920’s and 30’s and they were certainly still being sailed on Tyneside after the affiliation of the Newcastle club to the MYA and the beginning of a return to the mainstream of model yachting in the area. The photos show two surviving examples of this style of boat. Neither is easy to date, but I think that the earlier is the very extreme hull now in the though the Tyneside style of boat was recognised as being bigger and more extreme than most. This was, at least in part, because their racing was to windward only, the practice being to set a course which gave a true beat into whatever wind there was on the day. Add to this that most, if not all, of the lakes they sailed on were on or near the sea front or were large expanses of water in the upper Tyne valley and it’s not difficult to see how the typical Tyneside boat was even longer, narrower and deeper than the possession of Alan Thompson, the Secretary of the South Shields club. As you will see from the photos this boat is immensely long and narrow. Her norm for the class. They were regarded as monsters and brutes even by their builders and were clearly unsuitable for anything other than the very specialised type of racing for which they were designed. Unfortunately we have no surviving boats or drawings of Tyneside 10 Tonners from the period when the class was sailed all over the country; however, there is nothing in the discussion of them in the model press to suggest that they were radically different in hull form from their sisters elsewhere. When, in the 1870’s, other clubs abandoned the 10T for boats to the Length and Sail Area rule, those in the North East persevered with it. But they were not immune to the considerations of reducing wetted area that became a major concern for designers, both model and full size, when the results of Froude’s experiments on hull resistance became common knowledge. In the LSA classes, this eventually produced the cutaway profile and broad beam of the “skimming dish”, with much of the stability coming from the shallow and beamy hull form. The “1730” Rule heavily penalised any increase in beam, so reduction of wetted area was achieved by reducing the depth of the hull and changing little else, until the hull form approximated to that of a rowing skiff. Stability was maintained in effect by leaving the lead where it had been on a “plank on edge” hull and connecting it to the new attenuated hull form by a simple metal fin, often a plain sheet of steel or brass, reduced to the minimum lateral area to prevent the boat sliding away to leeward when sailing on the wind. By 1907 or so the type was well developed as shown by the drawing (10) of SEPTEMBER 1988 Top and above, Alan Thompson’s South Shields 710 Tonner of before 1914. Below and bottom, another Tyneside 10 Tonner, this time from the Tynemouth Club and probably dating from the 7920s. dimensions are somewhere in the region of loa 68, lwl 56, beam 5. I don’t have the exact figures and have scaled these from the photos. The hull is carved from two pieces of pine and is in good condition except for the loss of some of the moulding at the counter. The fin and keel are a single casting in bronze, a very fine piece of work, and are fitted to the hull by machine screws into a substantial bronze plate set flush with the bottom of the hull. The whole thing reeks of the model engineering approach to model yachting that was very common in the area, where a high proportion of the active membership of any club would have been drawn from the local shipyards and engineering works. The rig she would have carried is enormous as is indicated by the shots of South Shields boats discussed later. Alan has one photo of his particular boat which dates from before 1914 and shows her in a group photo of the club water. She is gaff with their boats in the ve all the other abo rs rigged, and towe gaff peak is well above the head of West beside her. The illustration of m a photo of Hartlepool boats, taken fro about 1907 gives an indication of the sort of rig that was used. extreme The other boat is slightly less beca use if only and I think rather later, ed by full size and uenc the bow form is inflprac tice of the twenties mainstream model truc tion is similar to ORT TEL LIE A OP AA Her boats in the group.her owner standing and thirties. The cons the deck is off, it is the other boat and as substantially possible to see both howand (at least in the these boats were made r’s or owner’s original photo) the makeinside. The keel is name inscribed on the e of engineering, again a substantial piec suggesting access to well equipped foundry facilities. of South Shields boats must The photos small date from the late 1920’s and are some made have I h whic from snap shots spoilt by copy negatives. Some of these arer very reflections and others were neve good in the first place, but they show what not much different from that of a a 10 Top middle, South Shields in the 1920s, the state of the Tonner with bermuda rig. Above, and rig raking art in the late 20s; rakish hull, ahead of Ben possibly a winged keel sixty years 10T hull and rig, Lexcen. Left, an earlier style ofBelow left and but note the through battens. The hull of the boat in the with Bill Daniels’ Albion. . The these boats looked like on the water ively boat shown in the photos is a relat late example to judge by her rig, which is the period. conventional model yacht of other photo is an earlier style and has a straight stem. Though she retains a gaff rig, it is a late through style with a single headsail and battens on both main and jib. The next hull shot is later again in style with the ner desig the of nce evide nct disti ing show g goin was what to tion atten having paid retains on in the twenties, though he still the fixed rudder of a “windwardanonly” boat. The fin again looks to be engineering solution. Can the careful covering of the bulb from the photographer conceal an early pair of wings? 1930, bottom right, Nippy. an A boat ofPhilip Leigh designed by Bidson. Bottom left, Vintage Day 4 September: Gosport A last minute reminder that we shall be meeting at Gosport on 4 September and to that we shall be trying to give an airing a number of vintage “A” boats. As a taster, photos of “Albion”, K129, Bill Phili) Daniel’s 1929 boat being restored by Leigh and a boat called “Nippy’, K162, that was first registered in 1930 and then transferred to a B W Green of the Bedford club in 1932. She is recorded as being l clu designed by a Mr Bidson of the Wirrato hi boats l Wirra of batch a of one and is design which were all registered together in January 1930, so she was probably a d Wirral boat originally. She is now owne by Peter Hodson and I rather doubt that she will be ready to sail by September.rd Contact address: R.R. Potts, 8 Shera Road, London SE9 6EP, Tel: 01 850 6805. MODEL BOAT
