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[Neil]

The beautiful aged model of the 70 year old very rough, hagard and beaten up old Barnett 51' lifeboat is finally getting her curves and good looks back.

The RNLB Mary Stanford, Ballycotten's famous old lifeboat has had her keel replaced and all the old cracking paint and dents cut out and filled, with final sandings to give her her lovely shape and lines.

She is changing from an old hen into a beautiful swan

So now that the exterior has been filled and sanded I am nowe going to turn my attention to sealing the boats hull so that there is no chance that she will decay anymore than she did over the last 70 years or leaking water once she takes to the lake.

For this, I am firstly going to paint all of the inside of the hull between all of the beams amd keel with polyester grp resin from keel to deck level and let it cure over night. I shall use it with a minimum amount of hardenner so that it gives time to seep in to all cracks and harden slowly.

[Neil]

I dug out my polyester grp resin and my mekp catylist this afternoon to make sure that the two were still in good shape and able to do the business, and mixed in a ratio of about 1;30 cat to resin, not the other way round or I might have been calling on the fire brigade before now lol.


The mix took about 25 minutes to reach the  state shown in the photo.........so will adjust the cat lower for the boat, as I want it to slow cure and get in to the cracks of the woodwork.

 But now that I know that the two componants do work I'll be able to continue  mixing and putting in to the hull.

[Neil]

Just looked up the ratio of resin to cat and was a little out, in fact about 50% too much cat, so why it cracked quite well. i did have a card with it all on hanging in my workshop when i was producing moulds and mountings up to 3 years ago but in those 3 years sinse, i cannot find it......but got a good idea that 3ml to 500 gm's of resin will produce a nice slow  cure in my warm garage

[Capt Podge]

hiya Neil - a photo from your old thread vis 3 Lifeboat builds, what goes into a model kit




Cheers,
Ray.

[Neil]

brilliant mate..........thank you so much...........god knows where it has gone to. cheers. 

[Neil]

Following a link that a fellow modeller,Ray found for me on modelboatmayhem that I had posted some 10 years ago [at least] I was now able to start laying resin in to the hull to seal it all from the inside.

To this point I have laid it in to the waterline on both sides with a liberal coating, and all the residue collecting in the lowest points of the hull.

Bearing in mind that I have , to do the first part of the sealing of the hull up to waterline level, used 500gms of resin, that which has now floated back down in to the lowest part of the hull, this is the perfect way to add small amounts of ballast in to the boat without lead weights having to take up space and also forming a level area to put any bastteries, thus making it a little easier to fit out.

Once I had painted in to the hull the resin, I cleaned of any smears of resin from the deck with a rag dipped in acitone......brought up the nice colours in the wooden deck planking.

Hopefully tonight I will mask off the deck releif exits and then lay the boat on its side and paint each flank in turn with more resin until both sides of the hull are sealed from the inside.

[Neil]

The upper half of the hull, both port and starboard has now been masked up to the bottom of the belting both with masking tape to cover the larger holes of the water sheds and the packing tape to cover all the 2mm holes left when I removed the split pins for the survivors rope grab lines.

Then I turned the boat on to its starboard side, mixed 200gm's of resin and catylist and poured it in to the upper frames, gently "painting" it in to all the cracks and crevises, where it will find its own level to cover all the joints in the framing and deck.

And just as Mike Pendlebury builds his hulls in the traditional way of double diagonal plank on frame, I found that the more i sanded the outer hull to get a good clean and smoothish finish, it was seen that this boat too, was, 70 years ago built in the same tradutional method, and the calico was indeed placed between the two layers of planking as was the traditional method that Mike also uses.

I am so privileged to be able to be restoring it, to working condition even if i am using modern techniques and materials..........at least it is being saved, and I thank John Davies for selling it to me.

That side is now curing and then I shall do the port side later this evening

[Neil]

Port side upper has now been resined and left to set.

And on Mike Pendlebury's recomendations I have this afternoon ordered off ebay a bottle of EZE KOTE water based resin which hopefully be here within 3 days.

Then I can cover the external hull with 25 gm grp gossomer cloth and then sand it all down.

[Neil]

When my grand father taught me how to wood carve with both a sharp pen knife and very sharp chisels i was a day old of 8 years, and he knew what he was doing. He was a Master Cabinet and Master Pattern maker by profession and mentioned in the members of the City and Guilds minutes on a regular basis, and so i had a brilliant teacher.


Sadly by that age he was in his early 80's and was going blind, but would check my standard of carving every half hour or so, and would tell me WITHOUT looking at the model hull, where I needed to carve a little more, or a little less and one day I asked how do you know without looking at my boat.


You can feel the wood with your fingers my lad, and you can feel the bumps and hollows in the model. they are far more sensitive for this than your eyes to see. And he was right!


This afternoon whilst cutting the grp fine covering for the final coating to the hull, i let my fingers rome over the hull and found two small hollows and one high spot that i hadn't fealt before, and so sorted them out.


First job, done, I cut the GRP cloth for when the resin arives next week, hopefully.


And finally up to now I have just been working on the hull, but soon I an going to have to think about the fittings on the model, where they go, and how many needed, and so started looking for the plans, but couldn't find them. Untill I remembered that when i gave the moulds away some years ago, I think the plans went with them..........but not to worry for i had a solution.


I turned to my "lads bibles"......... my four most used books on the design and development of old lifeboats, and I couldnt be without them.  There is so much information and sets of plans showing placement of all fittings, and some even have line drawings.


SO I used these to sort out a set of plans  for the finishing of the boat. All I have to do now is to sort out the best of those i found in 3 of the four books to my favourite printers, Granthams of Blackpool wjo have digital roller printers that will print to te nearest millimeter, and i will have a full set of 1" to the foot  plans,

[Neil]

my resin has arrived from "Hobbies" weithin 3 days of order.....good service.
now I can go a waterproofing.

but i think i'll change my shirt first..........dont wanna muck that up. Thought I'd follow your sartorial elegance Martin.

[Neil]

Whilst I couldn't do any more on the hull today as got distracted into doing another job today I did tonight finally cut and made from 2mm plasticard the main brackets for the bow gobeye, which I will find one off in my boxes of fittings and mount it on to the bracket.
I took the shape from that which i wrote and presented in a full build in Modelboatmayhem forum dating back to 2012.

[Neil]

The saying says "you learn something new every day"  Well I have today thanks to Mike Pendlebury a fellow master modeller on here.

  When he told me that I should use sticky hair spray to anchor the fine grp gossemer sheet to the hull of the boat, I believed Mike that it would work, but was very scepticle of how well it would glue........but boy oh boy.......sticks like poo to a blanket! Thanks Mike for the heads up.

  So I shall now carry on putting the port side  layer on to the hull in smallish manageable pieces and once covered I will add the resin that Mike also recommended.

 My only deviation from what Mike told me to do is in a test that I tried this morning. I placed a smal piece of the grp cloth on to a piece of ply first as a test, and poored a little of the resin on to it.

I used a small spatula to spead half of it on to the cloth and the other half I spread with a brush with reasonably harder brissles than a modellers paint brush. Although the results were the same in both, it was easier for me with my arthritic fingers to use a brush.

 And so will use a brush on my hull once all the pieces have been stuck in place with the hair spray.

[Colin Bishop]

Brush worked fine for me too Neil (on Dave’s Fairey hulls)

Colin

[Neil]

just given the first side a coat Colin, and although i knew there would be some final sanding down before painting, the resin is now cureing for the next day or so, as i am due in hospital tomorrow for a check up and from this evening i have to take some serious laxative so doubt i'll be straying out of the house tonight, lol.

next update will be wednesday lol. 

[Neil]

It is a long time ago that I built the first Barnett 51' lifeboat from moulds I made, and I had forgotten untill I have now applied the grp fine gossemer cloth to both sides of the hull of this very old vintage hull just how beautiful the shape of this lifeboats hull it really is, and was.

It has voluptuous curves and form and to be honest, is probably THE most beautiful hull shape of any lifeboat I have ever seen or built as a model myself.

If it were to be  associated by shape and form to a lady, I would say, it holds a candle to Gina Lollabrigida of my youth.

In the back ground is my earlier model of the fore runner 61' Barnett lifeboat that in hull shape reminds me of a race horse with its sharp lines, but no where near as beqautifully designed and shaped as its' successer, and I am jolly pleased I am getting the chance to restore to working condittion this fine  vintage model.

Tomorrow I will paint the second half of the boat with the water based resin to waterproof the rest of the hull, before I start sanding it all down ready for painting.

[Neil]

after 3 days consecutively firing up the heating in the workshop so that I could sit and sand the hull of its surplus sealer to waterproof and fill any cracks to make her watertight only for things of importance to take over and not get things don, today I decided to arrance two chairs in the back room and sand the hull there.

I'm glad I decided to do that, as it actually took me just under 4 hours continuously to sand the hull smooth with 3 grades of grit, 40, then 80 and finally 120 grade to get a nice smooth flat surface.


Hopefully monday will be a nice fine calm day as i plan on takung it down to fleetwood lake to put it in the water to test for any leaks. IF I find any I'll goive the area a squirt inside with a drop of spray paint., but hopefully I wont need it.

If it is totally watertight I will then commemse painting the hull with the usual  filler/primers  and then colour coats.
 

[Neil]

The more I  look in to this model of mine, the more I come to believe that she was built by a shipwright and professional model builder, for the interior structure, ribs footings and strakes are all that one sees in the plans that can be seen in the books showing the actual boats.
Not only that but such as the access "tubes" to the propellors for cutting away ropes and other such jettesoned materials from a casualty have all been added intop thje framework of the hull.
However my final mind blower of tgis build is that the cork belting acting as a bumper on the real lifeboats IS ACTUALLY CORK on the model. the builder has amazingly built the belting up from fine grained cork giving that spongy feeling of the real boats belting.
I only found this to be so and so acurate last night when i was sanding the hull down. The original builder all those 75+ years ago was certainly at the top of his class in accuracy tables, thats for sure.

Anyway, I have this afternoon blocked off the top ends to the propellor freeing tubes with some birch faced ply and 2 part epoxy so that there is no chance of water ingress from that area when sailing the model
And now I can take her to the model lake at fleetwood tomorrow with any luck for water tight testing.

[JohnD]

It is wonderful seeing this model come back to life. I acquired it from Mike Mayhew of Waverley Models at least 20 years ago and “life got in the way” of making any progress with the project. That plus a health collapse, which led me to reassess a lot of things, and to clear out a good many projects I knew I would never complete in this lifetime.

As to the provenance of the model, it almost certainly was built in the 1950s by a professional modelmaker. We just don’t know who. But there are some interesting discussions here:

https://www.modelboatmayhem.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=34603.0

https://www.modelboatmayhem.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,58314.msg608512.html#msg608512

[Neil]

Good to see you are watching this David, and I am so pleased and honored to be able to bring her back to life and able to now see her in her proper environment after so many years in that.......
......... the Gods shone on me this morning, as but for a little sea frett, [low mist covering to inland land lubbers], the boating lake at Fleetwood was so flat calm that I could see the bottom of the lake.............very rare indeed, and not a cloud in the sky. dreams can come true!

And so I tied a length of cord through the bow ruffel hole in the keelson so that it wouldn't drift away from the edge of the lake, and I unserimoniously dropped the RNLB Mary Stanford in to the drink, from about 18 inches as I cannot bend down these days as equilibrium is shot, and I tend to roll around like a turtle on its back lol.
She bobbed around for a few seconds before settling on a perfectly level keel about 25mm [ 1 inch to us old farts ], and there she sat for a good 30 minutes in the briney whilst I chatted to two old Friends from fleetwood about model trawlers and the decline of the fishing industry and docks in Fleetwood.

At the end of our lovely mornings' chat I looked carefully in to the hull and not a droplet of water had come in to the hull...........AN ABSOLUTE SUCCESS, NOT only for mine and Mike Pendlebury's advice and help in waterproofing [if indeed it was ever needed] the hull, but for the magnificent work that the original builder did to make such a beautiful model..

So now I can  begin the build by painting the hull, and fitting it out with external items, [in the correct order and then start detailing the deck and cabins etc.

I am so pleased and happy that the hull is now stable and stableised that I have no concerns about her taking on water once finished.

[JohnD]

Slightly off topic, but you did mention model trawlers.... I bought this one for £72, badly bodged and put it back together. The result is not perfect but not bad either. The job was a complete delight to do and the model is a complete delight on the water. Scale boating does not have to be expensive!

[Neil]

my first love, old model steam trawlers. I reviewed the Milford Star for one of the model boat magazines when it first came out from Frank Hinchliffe in his early days. built a few trawlers for museums over the years........being a fleetwood lad and watching the fleets come and go down the River Wyre.......they were my first models.

[JohnD]

I remember Milford Star because I grew up near Milford. We used to stock a large freezer with the contents of a "mixed kit", a kit being a wooden fish box. A mixed kit probably consisted mostly of dabs, but I had an arrangement with the son of one of the trawler owners that our mixed kit would consist mostly of good stuff with a thin layer of dabs on top. We became friends because we both used to race dinghies. Happy days.

[Neil]

Those were the glory days of ship building that I can remember.

[Neil]

Started on the fittings last night and partly finished it off this afternoon was the bow Gobeye plus rollers and hawser tube for the veering down anchor and cable.
This has to have plates attached to support it from the stem post and also the main bow breakwater attaches to this fitting and sweeps towards the stern also with two fitted fareleads almost at the meeting with the bow gobeye giving extra support,. once finished.


This has to be put in place before painting commences.