I've been a plastic modeller since before I did any other sort of modelling, but very few boats came my way, I modelled mostly aircraft and a few cars. Years ago, mid 70s, I bought an Otaki plastic kit of dubious parentage that purported to be a racing speed boat, but I never did anything with it as it was just too toy-like. (see the first pic below)
Backing up some years I've always been a fan of Sony Levi's 'Delta' shape boats, having seen 'Surfury', 'Delta 28', 'Merry-Go-Round' and others racing in the Cowes-Torquay races in the 60s, and of these 'Delta 28' has always been my favourite. It was just SO over-the-top, vastly overpowered and stupidly unstable! From Durlston Head I saw it almost loop once, luckily the driver did a splendid job and just averted total disaster. Needless to say a model of 'Delta 28' has always been in my mental short-list since I got back into model boating recently, but I was sure it was above my capabilities. A few months ago things took a radical turn for the better when I managed to get hold of a copy of Sony Levi's book 'Milestomes of my Designs'. I'd had 'Dhows to Deltas' for some years, but I knew 'Milestones' had much more detail than the other book, now at last I had both of them.
Looking at the plans in 'Dhows' it occured to me I'd seen that shape before........ (see pic 2)
I was almost sure it was the Otaki model so I dug the kit out of the loft and compared the two. It was difficult to be sure so I scanned and enlarged the plans to the model scale, around 1/20th, and there it was! The Otaki kit was an almost EXACT model of the 'Delta 28' hull even if the rest was imaginary. (see pic 3)
After trying a huge transom mounted fin in the '68 season, which worked about as well as lead manhole cover, the Gardner brothers fitted a long 'ran bow' to 'Delta 28', extended the aft hull surfaces and mounted the prop and rudder on a stinger, and some of these can be seen in the fourth pic below. This is how I wanted to model 'Delta 28' and Sony kindly provides excellent drawings of this modification, even down to the full size material specs! (see 5 below)
I scanned and re-scaled the ram bow drawings to the same 1/20 scale and compared it to the Otaki hull (pic 6 below) and I think it's possible. OK, so it won't be all that strong or as fast in scale as the real thing, but I think it will look good anyway! I'm working on installing a thick keel to make the ram bow profile and then add a couple of formers before skinning it in some fairly thick styrene. i've got a few 540-550 motors about and the hull is deep enough to take a beefy battery pack as well as the radio gear. The prop-shaft exit fairing will need moving aft and I'll have to do something about the stinger, but maybe a few words to Astec will solve that.
Plastic cutting starts tomorrow!