A Billings Boats Sea Star, the first successful model I made around 1976/77 (made a pigs ear of the mast though, it should be half that height, leaning back parrallel to the funnel and the two poles sort of overlapping ...)

Seem to be a few parts missing, supports for the superstructure, ventilators (which should screw on just in front of the navigation lights and on the open upper deck to hold it all together) and some furniture/deck chairs on the upper deck. There should also be some cabin doors along the main deck and at the back....

 

PBM 'Edwardian Paddlesteamer' Bought already built as a static model so I could convert it to R/C* it now looks very different to the picture on the box!

*Easier said than done, as it turned out, even with a smaller, lighter motor and the servos and batteries as low as possible it's still top heavy and needs a keel with a lead weight on the bottom attached to sail it. I replaced all the fittings with metal ones as the plastic parts (especially the railings) were too fragile. Should have replaced the brass funnel with a piece of plastic waste water pipe as that's one of the reasons it's so unstable. I aslo made it look more 'red funnel' (south coast)

 

Tattershall Castle.

While 'refitting' the PBM steamer I had the idea of making one from scratch, built in exactly the same way - and 1/32 scale! The only suitable ship that I could visit often to check details and stuff at the time was the Tattershall Castle in London. I soon found it had been altered extensively over time but we'll see how it goes...

This was the result, a six-and-a-half foot long plywood hull which was soon stashed away in the loft as I decided it looked a bit too square, but then again, it's only really below the waterline and doesn't look as bad as I thought (to me anyhow) when it's afloat, so I'm going to resume building it and see how it turns out.

There are a couple of things, maybe more than a couple, that I got totally wrong though like the bridge is a little too wide, engine room door/windows too far back and some of the portholes too big but it's all fixable and I just need to find, after a gap of about 13 years, suppliers of the materials and fittings.....

 

Test Hull No1

I did a sort of trial build on this first (not very good, I didn't really know how the ship was supposed to look at the time) It started life as a PBM Leander Class Frigate but available R/C equipment at the time (about 1975) was too big and heavy so I got the Sea Star instead. The leander had a solid balsa bow so it wasn't difficult to just sand it down into a new shape. First it became a fishing boat, like a longer version of the ORCA but it was too narrow so I sawed off the square stern, replaced it with a carved and sanded round one and changed the thing into a canal narrowboat. Then I changed it again into the paddlesteamer. The Tattershall Castle had already had the 'cargo deck' covered and the openings in front of the paddles sealed off so I made it like that and only found later that it was wrong...

 

 

Test Hull No2

OK, so I had this 'brilliant' (HA!) idea about making a hull out of aluminium mesh then covering it with glass fibre matting/resin. Incredibly, it actually floats - but looked horrible! Had I used a finer mesh or taken more care applying the glassfibre or used tissue instead of matting maybe, it could have been usable but now I know how you're supposed to make glassfibre hulls there doesn't seem any point wasting time on it - but that didn't stop me trying out a paddle drive made from bits of meccanno and powered by a modified Mamod SE1. I figured all the 'bodge-ups' wouldn't show with the superstucture in place - and the thing actually did work!

Of course, the engine has no reverse so it's not ideal for R/C (and in the pictures, there's a shaft missing with a pulley for the engine) but it works with an electric motor too, still, for all I know everyone else who makes a stern-wheeler is already using this method to drive the wheel............................