Hi Hutch

Who's gone bust?………Surely, not this Magazine Shop?

There will be plenty of members with the Ariel Plans out there

All the best

Bob

General Statement re: Plans Service

MyTimeMedia who own Model Boats and this website, together with numerous other magazines, have no financial connection whatsoever with Traplet Publications who went into administration last Tuesday.

Traplet Publications owned the Traplet Shop (and produced four magazines including Marine Modelling International).

All the Traplet staff were made redundant on Tuesday 18th July.

The Traplet Shop have printed and sold the old MyHobbyStore Plans Service since September 2016.

As I understand it, the Traplet Shop will soon be restarted 'under new ownership' as they say, but I do not know when and quite possibly under a different name.

Any inquiries concerning missing part orders should be directed to that organisation, once the Administrator of Traplet Publications has finalised their work.

I will post on here when there is a definitive conclusion to the negotiations currently in progress.

On another matter, the September issue of Model Boats, on sale on the 4th August, was itself at the printers when this news broke, and 'Varmint' in it is listed as a plan that would have to be purchased from the Traplet Shop. Indeed Traplet had already been supplied with the plan's PDF's and invoiced for it, but it was too late to stop the magazine at the printers, or rejig it and replace the substantial Varmint article.

That Varmint plan will be available to purchase, sooner or later, but again I cant say exactly when as that depends on the Administrator getting the best financial settlement for Traplet's creditors, but I imagine that won't be too long now.

Paul Freshney – Editor

I believe that the plans are still MHS copyright, they gave/sold Traplet the right to market them but you are right that they are a doubtful commercial asset. They are of course a unique historical modelling record and remember there are not just boat plans, there are hundreds of model engineering and aircraft plans/drawings as well.

Ideally they should go to a not for profit organisation such as a museum that will make them generally available either free or at cost but there don't seem to be any obvious institutions falling into that category.

Whilst many of the plans have been digitised by no means all of them have so there is a cost there too.

Interestingly, before the 'electronic age' many of the plans were published at small scale within the magazines as it was not easy to enlarge and copy them in those days. However the printed quality was usually good enough to bring these old plans 'back to life' from the old hard copy magazines as I did with the Bardic Ferry in one of the special issues I edited.

Colin

Edited By Colin Bishop, Website Editor on 26/07/2017 14:54:20

If there is some organisation happy to maintain them and make them available – that's fine. It's the documents that no one is prepared to support, or the ones that no one remembers, or can be bothered to collect which are the problem.

Putting them out on the web for free means that they will be copied widely, so they are less likely to get lost. That's what I did with the Keil Kraft EeZebilt plans, and my 'Old Boats' website has space for a lot of forgotten plans – though not so many contributors!

I am doing quite well with the old 'Sterling' plans – I have 11 plans for free download out of 29 identified model kits. See **LINK**

Edited By Dodgy Geezer on 29/07/2017 20:52:43