Greetings to all,
This is by no means a build log, but I thought it might be useful to show what mods I made to my Victoria. By the way, it's my first yacht :)
First off, this is a model that I rescued from our local online auction site - we have TradeMe in NZ and not eBay. Someone had taken it into a place called Cash Converters - the name should explain what that place does - and they were on-selling it - fortunately I was the only bidder and got it at a good price. The box had been opened and whilst there were numerous fingerprints on parts and parts taken off sprues, nothing was assembled and all parts were present.
I did a couple of mods not shown in the photos but detailed in Martins build elsewhere in this section, where leftover ply was used to strengthen around the keel mount area and build some supporting verticals. I also added, but can't photograph, a piece of ply that I put in across the width of the underside of deck, where the mast mount point and rigging lines connect into the hull. This is held in place by those same vertical bits of ply. And epoxy :) I did this because it seemed to me the the deck was particularly flexible across this width.
I spent some time looking at the Victoria resource centre (
http://www.victoriarc.org) and decided to modify the way the sail control line went through the Cockpit Rope Bushing. It seemed silly to have the line move vertically when it needed to move horizontally, so I substituted - eventually! - a fishing line snap as in the following photo. I tried several bits of bent metal before arriving at the the snap and this is why there are a few scrapes on the cockpit cover.
Also in this photo you can see that I changed the way of connecting the sail control line and the main/jib control line. No matter what I did I couldn't get the suggested method, using knots, to stay in place without some sort of tension on the line. This little ring is actually salvaged from a key ring and does the job almost perfectly. A counterpart located on the end of the sail arm on the servo - again the line needed to move horizontally and was being made to move vertically prior to the mods. The only downside to these mods so far is that the ring used where the sail lines join has caught (once) on the hatch cover handle and the ends of ring on the sail arm butted up to each other rather than overlapping as in the photo and this allowed the line to escape once - since fixed with a little glue - I hope!
The other mod was at the top of the mast where the main sail is supported. The instructions called for a cleat, but I substituted a home-made bowsie (if that's the correct term) as it was much easier to make work and adjust.
I have had Victoria out on the water a couple of times now - the second time was Christmas Day and in Auckland that was quite windy. So windy that Victoria had what I conservatively estimate was a 70 degree lean when going across the wind. Actually it was so windy I had trouble making any distance up the lake and had to resort to sailing back and forth across the lake. It was really too windy that day... With any luck, I will have it out later this morning! So far, sailing a yacht is a LOT of fun :)