Older readers will remember the Eagle comic which, apart from Dan Dare, Luck of the Legion, Harris Tweed etc., featured stunning double-width, cutaway drawings by (I think) A E Fisher. These featured locomotives, aeroplanes, ships, cars - in fact just about anything that moved - in colour and full detail. Thus, at the age of about 14 and getting interested in model boat building, a plan of the Denny SGB 'Grey Goose' caught my eye. Using the colour spread as a guide, I built my model and installed a Mamod SE1a, single-cylinder reciprocating engine. I recall this cost the enormous sum of £1 1s. 6d and thus must have required frantic saving of pocket money to acquire. I cannot recall if the stability was ever checked prior to the maiden trip on the local pond; however, with an impressive plume of steam from the funnel, the Goose was launched, steamed in a broad arc, heeled over .....and sank.... Post-salvage, this was found to be a happy event (?) as the pond water had put out the internal fire started by the burner. (Insulation? - What insulation?) Subsequent modifications were successfull and I had many happy hours of sailing - or was it the effect of methylated spirit fumes from the burner?
Many years later, casting around for my next model boat project, I decided to return to my roots. This time the scale was 1/32 which produced a double-plank-on-frame model of LOA 4'-6" based on John Lambert's plans. S302 was chosen as the pennant number because this was the number assigned to a hull which was never constructed and thus gave the 'rivet-counters' no opportunity to pounce on the location of the bridge ashtray etc. Power is from two Monoperm Super motors driving 47mm PropShop screws via 2.5:1 home-made reduction gearboxes. The for'd 2lb QF, the aft Rolls Royce 40mm cannon and the searchlight all fully traverse; the navigation lights and searchlight illuminate and the Robbe siren unit gives a very satisfactory whoop-whoop! Apart from most of the electronics, some of the crew figures and the RR 40mm, everything else is scratch built in some two years of construction. Next project? Well I've a feeling that it's time to return to steam power but this time something bigger and better than that old Mamod SE1a!