As Francis Chichester's
Gipsy Moth IV is still one of the most famous sailing yachts in history, you'd think there would be plenty of plans and reference material available for modellers. However, this seems not to be the case! An extensive web search has turned up absolutely no links to, or mentions of, any commercially available scale drawings of Gipsy Moth IV. (It doesn't help that there are a lot of pages + forum threads relating to the De Havilland biplane of the same name!) I can't even find any decent high-res photos of the real boat - either in its current seaworthy condition, or on public display at Greenwich. All I can find is this document on the boat's restoration -
http://media.wiley.com/assets/1326/49/GMIV.pdf - which is an interesting read, and has some useful photos + drawings, but not really enough to build a model from.
Earlier this year, a friend of my fathers' gave me an old kit he found in his loft, to build a 26.5" sailing model of Gipsy Moth IV. The kit is produced by Hobbies and I would guess is from the late . It has a vacformed hull and cabin, wood deck and spars, and a few plastic fittings. Looks very basic but could build into a very nice working model with the help of a lot of scratchbuilding work. Unfortunately, the instructions and, most importantly, plans are missing from the kit!
Without proper scale plans, or at least some half-decent closeup photos I can't really do much with the kit. Can anyone help? I'd like to build this kit as my next R/C sail project - I completed a restoration of a Graupner "Optimist" earlier this year, and the Gipsy Moth looks like it might make a good subject for my next project - with its two-masted ketch rig, it should be an interesting challenge to build and sail - and at 26in long the kit is a lot more compact and easily transportable than the large and heavy Optimist! Gipsy Moth IV is also an interesting and historically significant boat which is very rarely seen in model form.
For anyone interested, here are some photos of the kit:
The 6"/15cm ruler gives an idea of the hull size. The plywood deck is rather thick and heavy, and fits on top of a flange moulded around the hull top. When/if I build the model, I'm planning to remove the flange and scratchbuild a new, lighter deck. Most of the plastic fittings appear to be missing (the kit on eBay, linked to below, looks to have a lot more plastic parts in it) - not a great problem, as they are so crude + chunky as to be better rebuilt from scratch.
Also, here's another kit which sold on eBay in August -
link - the buyer certainly got a bargain here at under £20 including postage! Unlike mine, this one is unstarted and complete (including plans, by the look of it). I didn't spot this auction when it was up, otherwise at this price I'd have been tempted to bid on it for the plans alone.