Leonard Treppa’s latest model in his own words
The James Pottinger Free Plan and article in Model Boats, December 2015 was very interesting and I liked the lines of the hull and decided to build it using the complimentary plan as a guide. However, instead of the model being approx. 30 inches long at the Free Plan scale of 1:25, this version is 20 inches long and the other dimensions have been adjusted accordingly.
The hull
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This is of bread and butter construction being built in three sections, with separate port and starboard sides and the central keel piece. The hard part of making this hull was to make mirror images of each half as I do not use templates, but rely on sight and feel. Also the inside was cut away to make the hull lighter. To shape the hull, a hand plane, gouge, rasp and various sanders were initially used, the three sections being finally glued together and sanded to an overall smooth finish. This was a lot of hard work and quite time consuming, not to mention a lot of wood shavings as well.
Deck and superstructure
The deck is piece of thin Mahogany, cut to shape with openings for the superstructure unit and large aft facing triangular companionway. Later, the deck was scribed with lines, using an extra fine black ball point pen, to look like planking.
Most of the wheelhouse and deckhouse are from 1/16 inch Basswood. All of the fittings, except for the tyres, propeller, portholes, brass handrails, stropped blocks and turnbuckles, are scratch built from wood or brass rod. Notably, the cowl vents are made from two different sizes of dowel rod, shaped and sanded to size. The turnbuckles for the rigging lines are in fact the very small barrel swivels used for fishing, cheaper than specific model boat versions, and they look great. For the glazing in the wheelhouse and skylight, black card stock paper was applied to the inside of the clear styrene sheet. The hardest part of building this static model was making the gunnel and gluing in the timber heads and bulwark top rail, which all took quite some time.
The deck is varnished and the hull is painted matt black, with the rest being of matt grey.
Conclusion
I really enjoyed building this model and was happy at how well it turned out and as it so happened was also invited to display some of my model boats at the Hobby-Rama show of 20th Feb 2016, this event including trains, planes, automobiles and boats. I took along 14 models for display and the P.S. Monarch (December 2015 MB) and Admiralty MFV 96 were a big hit at the show as well as Orca from the Jaws movie and African Queen from the film of the same name.
Thank you for your interest – Leonard Treppa.
