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= =—«s_—gs_— Southportand a Fleetwood ow Shows ji Power Scene reviews » Ue MARINE ABC _SUPERPLAN _ FEATURE Full-Size Plans for Dutch General Harbour Duties Vessel HAVENDIENST 4 0144-2910 ISSN ODEL ENGINEER EXHIBITION SM r; \ 91015 difficult as the rudder had only a limited range of possible positions and was fixed cutters. I made a small jib headed topsail for the one I am restoring, but have since found an illustration in a Gamages’ catalogue that suggests that she should have small topsail yards to spread the head and foot a little larger than the extent of the mast and gaff. She can only have used sucha rig in very light weather. Photo 2 shows the first boat, which I am restoring for a customer, getting a lll nae gi once the boat had left the shore. There is probably a knack to it and I need more practice in getting the right combination of sail and rudder trim for each course. The main trick is to unlearn the habits of the the present and realise that a sail trim for most efficient sailing does not give the most effective steering on off wind legs. Early books and articles on how to sail your model tend to assume that the head sails are going to remain in the close hauled position or something very close to it on any point of sailing. This gives a weathercock effect on the down wind legs, particularly when, as is very often the case, the headsails are set on a long bowsprit. This will help a lot in counteracting the turning effect of a large mainsail out on one side of the boat. Possibly even a radio controlled model of this type would do well to leave the headsails on a fixed setting and control only the sheeting of the mainsail. This would certainly simplify the problems of sheet control on boats with three or more sails to sheet and all with different take off arrangements and sheeting travel. 3 and 4 are photos of a small boat dating from the 1920s and built by a Southwold fisherman for sale to summer visitors. Rigged as simple gaff sloop, she is in most respects an entirely practical sailing model, but she retains (even in this very small size) the scale-like style of lug headed topsail that was typical of the local fishing smacks when these were still sail powered. mentioned last month the large number of vintage toy sailing yachts that have been emerging lately. This month I start off with a round up of some of the photos that have accumulated in the last few months. No. 1 shows the rear ends of three hulls; typically, when I only take one shot, it has to be the one at the start of the film with a black shadow where I forgot to wind the new film on far enough after I had loaded it. The two upper hulls are close sisters and come from the Liverpool manufacturer Frank Sugg, who I mentioned a little while back; they are about 20in. long and appear to date from the pre-1914 period. The third hull is smaller and of a slightly earlier style. As I have pointed out before, there is no certainty in dating this sort of model by style, as they stayed in production for decades absolutely unchanged. Though she is clearly a commercial product, there is now no way of tracing her manufacturer; many of the smaller models sold under the name of big stores like Gamages or specialist model engineers like Bassett-Lowke and Stevens’s Model Dockyard were in fact bought from other buidlers and appear in more than one of the big stores’ catalogues. All three are carved from good quality pine and have pine decks with a carved-in camber. The original deck eyes are very neat and are made from small pins, possibly the sort used by entomologists for securing their specimens, “bug pins”, bent to the appropriate shape for each location. The two Sugg boats have a moveable rudder controlled bya tiller that runs under a horse with serrations to give a click stop control. All three boats are rigged as gaff 36 surreptitious sailing trial in her undercoat. This was a mistake in commercial terms, as the paint failed to protect the woodwork completely and the undercoat will have to be done again when the cracks have dried out. On the other hand I found that she could be very satisfactorily sailed, provided the course and trim were set to avoid any risk of being headed. The twin sheets on the headsails meant that the boat would not self tack and make her a bit of a liability in fluky winds. Going to windward was all right as the boat balanced quite well with the rudder central, but other courses were much more MODEL BOATS very heavy for a serious racing yacht. Another boat that is not a 36R is shown in photos 9 and 10. This is too narrow and too small in displacement to be a 36R, but is probably a home designed and built model from some time in the late thirties or, possibly, just post war. The hull is quite finely made, but the rig, which is a later refit, is relatively crude. So are some of the fittings, which again look to be a later addition. A Tyneside Tonnage Rule Boat Some time ago I wrote about the extreme, not to say decadent, form the Tonnage Rule produced in the hands of 5 and 6 show the hull of another commercial model, again from the early years of the century. She is christened Alexandra, a suitably patriotic name for the period. Though there is no identification on the hull and the hull form is different, it seems very likely that this is another Frank Sugg boat. The rudder arrangements are the same, as is the style of hull paintwork. Alexandra’s owner has been doing some research model sailing on his local pond, the Canoe Lake at Southsea and has turned up in the Portsmouth City Archive a magnificent photo of a pair of model yachts starting in a race in 1909. I shall reproduce this in a future article, when I have done some more homework on the local clubs so that I can extract as much information as possible from the image. Moving up in size and coming forward a little in time, workshop photos (7 and 8) of a boat in process of having many layers of paint stripped from her. Her hull form suggests that she dates from the twenties or early thirties. Though she is 35in. overall, her beam is too great for her to be built to the MYA’s 36 Restricted class, which, in any case, only started up in 1930. The style of construction, with a number of heavy sawn frames interspersed with the bent frames, is also JANUARY 1990 37 A 10-Rater from the Thirties… Some photos now (13, 14, 15) of a 10-rater which has come to light in the Scarborough area. She is called Fie and was built by a member of the Scarborough club before 1939. His widow recalls that she won some trophies, but can’t remember which. I can find no trace of any boat of this name in the MYA Register for the class, so I conclude that though she may well have been raced seriously, she did not travel outside her own club. Since the photos were taken, the original sails have turned up and they bear no registration number, so my search in the Register was predestined to fail. The dating of the boat from style alone is, as such things always are, a problem. The hull form is full and would give a relatively high displacement. This suggests that she is after and, possibly well after, the revolution in 10-r design that came with Jim Steinberger’s Phoenix of 1930. There were published heavyweight 10-r designs in Model Engineer shortly before Phoenix appeared. These are very probably by Alfred Turner but, so far as is known, they were not built to. On the other hand, the style of the Braine gear, with its very closely mounted the model yachtsmen in the North East, particularly when they went on using the Rule into the 1920s after everyone else had moved on to other types about the turn of the century. That piece was illustrated by a massively long and narrow hull now owned by Alan Thompson in Sunderland. Photos 11 and 12 are of a boat of rather later vintage than Alan’s, which I would place in the late twenties or even early thirties. The dimensions that her owner sent me calculate out to something over 17 tons, so she may have raced in the 20 Ton class or she may be a boat intended to be a 15 Tonner. A very small error in the measurements, particularly of the beam could make a huge difference to the rating of a boat when the beam was effectively cubed in the calculation under the Rule. Either way, she is the only boat of this type that I know of that is fit to sail. I hope to have further reports on this one when she has been given a sailing trial. 38 MODEL BOATS pin rack to control the movement of the tail of the quadrant, suggests the preceding decade. Incidentally, the quadrant has got itself mounted back to front for the photo. The retention of the bowsprit is an even clearer throwback to earlier practice. Even allowing for the possibility that the builder carried some fittings over from an older boat to his new project, these suggest that he had been building model yachts for a long time before this one. He is known to have built several other boats. The bowsprit is a particular curiosity as it seems to serve no real purpose, except possibly to carry a bumper which might, or might not, protect the stem in the case of a collision. In the photo it barely overhangs the prow and has a quite excessive inboard length. It may be intended to run in the brackets that enclose it and form the base of the very long jib rack, but there seems to be no fitting that would allow its position to be controlled. Even so, its only function seems to be to complicate the mounting of the jib rack. I prefer the evidence of the hull to that of the fittings, so I put her in the middle thirties. The hull itself is in remarkably good condition considering its age and the fittings look almost as good as new. I hope to have further news of this interesting restoration project in due course, but her the boat. She is a twin fin model to the Length and Sail Area Rule. As with Fie, there are contradictory pointers in the evidence for dating. The hull form, the fact that she is a 5-rater (about 30in. overall) and the style of the steering gear suggest that she probably dates from before rather than after the 1914 war. 5-raters were relatively rare, compared to the larger 10-r and only a small number of clubs sailed them; they more or less disappeared from the formal record of model yachting activity after 1920. The rig, however, is a Bermuda mainsail, even though a low and therefore early example. True jib headed mainsails were unknown on full-size racing yachts before 1920 and extremely rare on models, so the rig is almost certainly from after 1920. The condition of the sails and the use of an aluminium headboard for the main also point to a later date for these than for the hull. I conclude that she was re-rigged some time in the 1920s, possibly in the late 1920s, to produce a somewhat anachronistic style of hull and sail combination. I reject the possibility that our ignorant antique dealer married the hull with a rig from some other later boat. I do this not because I cannot bring myself to think so ill of the trade, but because the rig is too good a match to the hull to be the result of an ill informed spatchcocking together of randomly available elements. present owner is a seagoer and has only limited time at home to work on models. …and one from the 1920s Photos 16 and 17 are of a boat that is now on display in a marina shop in South Africa. She is of UK origin and was, apparently, bought from an antique dealer in London under the description “1920 America’s Cup Challenger’. This tells us something about the level of knowledge of both model and full-size yachting of some London antique dealers, but nothing about What its all about: An “‘A”’ and two “‘M’’s Finally, some photos this month which typify what the vintage movement is trying to achieve. The first, (18), shows the “A” Boat Esther which, designed and built by Bill Daniels and sailed by him and Tommy Lance, won the National JANUARY 1990 Championship and the “YM” Cup in 1950. She is seen being sailed, indeed raced, again at the Bournville Vintage Day in 1989. The man with the pole is Vic Bellerson, who is currently active on the vane racing scene and jumped at the chance to instruct her new owner in how to sail so impressive and important a vane boat. In the background is Jnvicta, a boat from the 1960s, which was also having a first run after a major rebuild and restoration. Also at Bournville is a shot, (19), capturing the moment when Marblehead K26, Sagitta, a boat built in this country in 1937 to the American design Wampum IT took the water again for the first time in over 25 years. As I mentioned whenI first wrote about her, she placed third in the first ever M Championship held at Ryde in 1937. 20 shows a hull built in America this year to the Bill Daniels’ design Pocohontas of 1936. This is the work of Rod Carr, the EC12 guru, who needed an M so that-he could compete in interclub races in the North West. The clubs there have a series of two day meetings with one day of racing for EC12s and one for Ms. He chose to build an old design because he is attracted to boats that look more like the real thing than modern Ms and, I suspect because he wanted to have a go ata planked varnished hull and a fully planked deck. The standard of the workmanship is something to behold and, so far as the hull is concerned, the only variations from the original design are a larger EC12 style hatch to facilitate the radio installation and a change to a deck stepped mast. Rod writes that his latest EC12 has a planked deck too, so we may see a more general return to proper wooden boats some day. I shall be very interested to hear how she performs, not least as she is the only vintage boat so far that has been built or restored with a view to competition with the current product. I would expect her to be more tender than modern designs, with their deep fins and high ballast ratio, but possibly just as fast in light air and in other conditions where she is able to carry the same sail area as her rivals. Even if she does not prove to be competitive in modern conditions, Rod has made himself something very beautiful, which should be reward enough. One of these days, I intend to restore a 1920s 6-m for competition under radio and in that class I would hope that the differences in performance between old and new designs would not be too drastic. But all these things seem to take an inordinate amount of time. Contact address: R. R. Potts, 8 Sherard Road, London SE9 6EP, Tel: 01-850 6805.
