Creating Interest in Model Boats

[David Marks 2Participant @davidmarks2]

There has been pervious postings on this forum regarding the decline in interest in model boats, particularly with the younger generation. As a committee member of the Dolphin Model Boat Club (DMBC) based in Orpington, I decided to start promoting DMBC via a couple of the booklets that many of us have posted thorough our letter boxes on a regular (usually monthly basis). In a new venture called Around Orpington, I spotted an Events Page and then someone advised me of a monthly document called the Gazette issued by a local residents association, also with a list of events. Both gladly accepted our "advert" on a free of charge basis……..the result BINGO. We have gained one new member, but the additional interest has been amazing. Surprisingly some of this has come directly from the younger generation, with two examples of grand-children stopping with grandparents, seeing the advert for DMBC and then heading for the pond, with grandparents in tow! I think we may be getting at least one Junior Member when we kick off our 2019 season in April. Also it will pay us to create a list of vendors such as Howes, Component Shop etc., as we get many requests of where do a get this or how do I do that etc.

[David Marks 2Participant @davidmarks2]

[Paul TParticipant @pault84577]

The younger generations see model boats as an old mans hobby, this feeling is reinforced every time I go to a boat show of take my boats for a sail as all I see are grumpy old men muttering about how things were different when they were kids.

But if a youngster turns up at a sailing lake with their birthday present (ready to run speedboat) how many of us take the time to welcome them or do we just give them the cold shoulder and complain about hi speed plastic toys being a danger to our 'proper models'.

[ashley needhamParticipant @ashleyneedham69188]

Paul. You should come to Bushy where we are all anything but grumpy and a fair few boats I am sure have been made with the general public in mind…

I always take a lander down so younger persons, mums/dads or indeed older persons and persons whose boats have broken down, can have a go.
Boaters need to bring their children along and grandparents need to bring the grandkids out.

Engaging the public is also top of my list, in conversation or otherwise. Interesting stuff about the boats and nothing about how many planks and what grades of wood you used. I wonder if a Bushy park boating leaflet might be nice to have, to hand out as required ??

Ashley

[Colin BishopModerator @colinbishop34627]

An excellent initiative David and one which other clubs could consider following.

Colin

[CookieParticipant @cookie15923]

i totally agree with Paul kids with small fast elctics are turn up at our pond and are given the by the cold shoulder by the older guys in the club even when they show a interest in our scale boats , i don't known the way forward with this it's sad.

Dave

[Ray Wood 3Participant @raywood3]

Hi All,

My 13 year old grandson & I were boating on Sunday morning at the Chantry club at Bluewater with our Mtb's which are quite nippy ! George had that lightbulb moment when he saw a Club 500 racer doing its stuff ! He uttered the magic words "I'd like one of those grandad" happy days 2 on order soon speed is the key !!

Regards Ray

[S MParticipant @sm83187]

I thin k there are several problems here, first we have the instant gratification mentality of many (not all) youngsters who want it all now and have no patience, secondly, we have parents who have instilled and encourage this behavior by pandering to their every whim and buying them speed boats in ready to go form.

Thirdly, there is a mentality among many parents in which they cannot be bothered to do anything with their children and certainly won't take them out for an afternoon over the weekend as many are more intent on drinking and nursing hangovers the next day, and fourth there are the parents who lack any skills themselves and certainly couldn't build a model boat, not even from a kit.

Society also has a role to play by portraying false perceptions where people see an older man and make assumptions, usually incorrect ones and this plays a major part in driving a wedge between people, similarly, the same parents are often the ones forcing children to grow up before their time and stop them from being children. In many respects this prevents children trying something and getting it wrong and not allowing them to get things wrong means they don't make mistakes from which they can learn; there are many more reasons and you can add your own.

[Colin BishopModerator @colinbishop34627]

So in brief people no longer make stuff they prefer to buy it.

And instead of building a better boat, just buy a better phone!

There will always be interest in model making I think but it will never be the mainstream activity it once was. There is of course growing interest in 3D printing to make things as quality improves and costs come down but I'm afraid that doesn't appeal to me.

Colin

[Paul TParticipant @pault84577]

SM you have a very dystopian view of modern life, I don't think that even George Orwell had such a bleak outlook on life.

I

[Bob WilsonParticipant @bobwilson59101]

Had to look up "dystopian" to find out what it meant! It has not got that bad at yet, but I have no doubt at all that it will do! Afraid mobiles have practically dominated a lot of lives both young and old, and as one cannot un-invent things, we are stuck with them. Just got to accept and adapt. I have accepted that my form of model shipbuilding is now practically extinct, but as long as it continues to give me something to do, I guess it doesn't matter, but I have now ceased to try and interest anyone else in it, and will soon be phasing myself out of social media!

Bob

[Paul TParticipant @pault84577]

Bob

Your style of model shipbuilding will never become extinct as people will always pay for objects crafted with the kind of skills that you have.

As for us mere mortals perhaps someone should develop an 'phone app' that can control a model boat and drag us into the 21st century.

Paul

[Bob WilsonParticipant @bobwilson59101]

Paul,

Mine will become extinct because I have lost 90% of my market now that I am no longer prepared to send models out by courier because of damage risk. Therefore my output will be reduced to almost zero. Collectors will never get tired of them, but as far as the UK is concerned, the seller is legally responsible to get them to the buyer in perfect condition, and that is a risky business, as couriers are not forced to take responsibility for items in their care. Also. selling at a distance where the buyer does not see the item until it arrives, it is a legal requirment that if the buyer, on receipt, decides they do not want it, for whatever reason, the poor old seller has to refund in full, plus transport costs, AND pay the return costs to get the item back! So, it is the end of the line for me, but at 74, it is no great disaster!

Bob

[Dave MilbournParticipant @davemilbourn48782]

Paul

I think that's the root of the problem i.e. that people can pay for something as opposed to making it. Modelling has always been in a rarified space in that historically we've had to make the stuff we needed. Few other outdoor activities have this requirement – imagine being told that membership of a golf club required you to make your own clubs. No longer. Flash the plastic and the best of China can be yours to operate straight out of the box……until it needs mending, that is. Then just chuck it away and look for the next cheap thrill.

The kid said "That's a wicked boat, mister. How much did it cost?"
"I made it" I replied.
He asked "Why?"
I didn't have a ready answer.

As regards the phone 'app' [a horrible abbreviation] I saw indoor drones several years ago that were controlled by spotty 'erberts with their phones instead of a good old tranny. No doubt that facility now exists for 'outdoor' drones, so it's just a matter of time before someone applies it to a model boat. Can't wait to try it.

In the meantime I'll carry on gluing Part A to Part B; sanding it to shape and painting it. Like Bob, it's simply what I do.

Dave M

[Paul TParticipant @pault84577]

Model building will always appeal to people who want to push their own limits and rely on their own abilities, true it might not happen until retirement but that is what modern life is like.

[neil hpParticipant @neilhp]

thankfully, I was mking models from my 8th birthday, and thank god, still making them…….but getting my kids involved was impossible………..mind you they were both girls, and one went on to try her hand in the merchant navy before deciding it wasn't for her.but at least she tried.

[Eddie LancasterParticipant @eddielancaster]

I also started making things at 10 years old, then from 13 years I had a day each week for two years with an excellent woodwork teacher, He also taught me to read a micrometer, a skill I didn't use for another 30 years!

My point is there is such a great pressure on schools teaching the current curriculum that skills that we regard as basic are no longer taught but merely touched upon for one term.

My own Grandson knows more about computers than I will ever know but he can control a high speed boat easily

using his gaming skills, but I cannot get him interested in making a boat, but I will keep trying.

Eddie.

[Bob WilsonParticipant @bobwilson59101]

The lack of interest in boats is not confined to the young by any means. I have never been interested in boats either full size or models! I suppose my main interest is in ships of between 1,000 tons and 20,000 tons, although I have built smaller or larger ones from time to time. If there was any suitable water available round here, I would certainly produce a radio-controlled cargo ship or sailing ship, but triangular-shaped pieces of wood or plastic zipping along at 20 or 30 knots has never sparked any intereset whatsoever in me, although I acknowledge that they do seem to be very popular.

Bob

[Colin BishopModerator @colinbishop34627]

Good on your daughter Neil, as you say, she tried and now she won’t spend the rest of her life wondering if she has missed her vocation.

I appreciate that we are all keen to promote model boating on here and rightly so but I don’t think there will be any more than limited success. When many of us were kids, modelmaking was a mainstream leisure activity and we naturally channelled our creative instincts and desire to learn new skills into it. Today’s youngsters have other avenues to express their creativity and to learn skills which will be useful to them in the future. Writing an elegant bit of computer code can be very creative and satisfying for example.

It’s no good expecting our descendants to embrace our interests any more than my Dad’s passion for stamp collecting appealed to me back in the 50s & 60s.

Times change. When home computers took off in the 80s there was huge interest from young people. You had those who wanted to learn to program in order to create things such a games and utility programs (sort of prehistoric Apps!) and this compared with say scratchbuilding whereas others were happy to retype pages of code from magazines into their computers to replicate programs created by others which is probably analogous to kit building. I had great fun learning BASIC and writing a couple of naval war games into the 24 kilobyte program space of a Sinclair Spectrum although I was a bit long in the tooth at that time. You had to be very creative and I used every last available byte!

So there are two elements really, one is to learn new skills and the other is to apply them creatively. These days you might be looking at learning CAD to design structures or items which can be 3D printed and I’m sure that must give people just as much satisfaction as we got from building our boats back in the day with the bonus that it is a useful career skill as well.

So there is no real incentive today for youngsters to follow in our footsteps as it won’t give them very much in the way of useful life skills except for a small number in niche occupations. They are better directing their efforts elsewhere.

Many previously vital skill sets are now no longer necessary. Sail training may be romantic and help develop personal attributes but it has no relevance to a career at sea these days.

For the latest modelling techniques, has anyone seen the amazing 3D replicas created from the surveys of the Black Sea shipwrecks like the one below?

Colin

[Malcolm FraryParticipant @malcolmfrary95515]

Bob just touched on a fundamental problem – somewhere to sail. As a growing lad, I had three viable waters within a ten minute bike ride. I live in the same area, my nearest is now a twenty minute drive away.

[Colin BishopModerator @colinbishop34627]

Same here in SW Surrey, no suitable water. I don't actually run my boats all that often but now travel up to Bushy Park which is a 50 minute drive.

Colin

[Bob WilsonParticipant @bobwilson59101]

I don't think model making ever provided anything in the way of life skills, it was just a hobby, for amusement, maybe even to get away from the real world. Nowadays, it has even become quite expensive for those who build kits. Those who scratchbuild R/C models are also stuck with the cost of R/C equipment, motors, propellers, batteries etc. It doesn't matter how clever you are at computers, video games, mobiles etc because there is not much in the way of a physical result and it doesn't guarantee you a job either. We are in Preston, and the nearest water seems to be Fleetwood, and I believe that is empty in the winter as well. With a vast area of unused water in the form of Preston dock, I am amazed that no-one has put it into use for R/C. It is so large that there could be separate areas for the younger generation, high speed electrics, slow speed models and sailing models. The sad fact is that 90%, possible more, of the younger generation seem to prefer the virtual world of mobiles, and computer games and not many of them would know which way to turn a nut to tighten it up!

Bob

[Colin BishopModerator @colinbishop34627]

I think you may be wrong about life skills Bob. Model boating taught me a lot of fundamental things which I was able to put to good use in the future. I learned about woodworking, painting, principles of electricity, that unpainted hardboard absorbs water, principles of radio and servo mechanisms and many other useful miscellaneous practical subjects.

As a result of that, although my working life has been entirely office related I am competent in domestic electrical wiring and lighting, plumbing, decorating, (including tiling and floor laying) minor carpentry repairr and even built our first conservatory out of hardwood including excavation, laying down the foundations and associated building works. Until my agility went I was OK with minor roof repairs too including installing and aligning TV aerials.

I fitted out my own workshop from part of the garage and until things went too high tech, did much of the maintenance on my earlier cars. When I owned a full size boat I did almost all the maintenance myself.

All this grew from my early practical experience in making models andmaking them go and gaining familiarity with materials, electrics etc. I'm sure many older people on here would be quite comfortable with these skills too.

I wonder how many of today's Millennials could cover even a fraction of this?

Colin

[Bob WilsonParticipant @bobwilson59101]

I don't doubt what you say at all, but really, it doesn't necessarily have much to do with making models, because most of the older generation learned all of those practical skills as they went along, many of them without having built a model in their lives. I myself never progressed beyond the junior grade in woodwork and metalwork and my work was assessed as "poor!" Not that it worried me, because I was not all that interested in making letter racks, wooden boxes, match barrels, ashtrays etc! but I was always making radio sets, model ships and the occasional aircraft as well as messing about with steam engines and pulling clocks to pieces and putting them together again.

Where my PC is situated, I am next to a large window with lace curtain at right angles to the front door. When the paper boy arives in the morning, I can see him putting the paper in, but they can't see me because of the curtains. Most of them (they change often) have headphones on or mobiles in hand, and blank stares. Just for interest, during the summer, I left an old valve radio without is case on a table outside the door. I know that I would have been fascinated with something like that when I was young (still am for that matter ) Anyway, when the paper arrived, it didn't arouse any curiosity at all, the blank stare remained fixed, and off he went. Another time, I left a model ship hull (about a foot long) on the table. This was picked up, given a casual glance, and put down again, but not really with any great interest – certainly not as much as a visiting cat showed!

Bob

[Byron Rees…(Ron)Participant @byronrees-ron]

Hi All, (Another one of my epistles)

This 'never ending' subject is forever doing the rounds, it is as if some of us slightly wrinkled model makers feel the need to justify the fact that we love playing with fiddly bits of wood and plastic and spending copious amounts of money on paint, glue, wood, kits and hardware as well as copious numbers of hours making something like a true scale 18mm steering wheel for a ship nobody really gives two hoots about.

Most human nature analysts would say that we've picked up these skills and the need to use them from watching our parents perform similar tasks when we were kids, or that schools in our youth were more intent on practical life skills instruction, but the fact is that most humans are born equal and they acquire their skills through copying others but …only if they want to.

I often think of the fabulous film clips of baby monkeys watching Mum or Dad choose a rock for an anvil and a liftable rock for a hammer to smash hard shelled nuts, but in their world once weaned if you didn't learn what could be food and how to get it you would starve. Nature takes no prisoners.

I really feel, from experience that some people are born with an inquisitive mindset, some are downright lazy and some are so devious or intelligent that they manage to get others to do the nut breaking for them. It would seem that the inquisitive ones go on in later life to try and fill every waking moment not needed to get food, money or pay the mortgage, with some other task and into that category most of us fall.

There seems to be no point in trying to get a youngster interested in something that he's really not interested in, yet just because he/she feels the need to collect stamps, read poetry, dance the quickstep, go catching fish play on a mobile phone or anything else, they are 'a waste of space' because they don't make models.

Even those that do make a lego toy or a plastic kit in their childhood are far too busy through their formative years just trying to keep on top of the national curriculum, then along comes marriage, children, mortgages, bills and all the other pressures on your life, time and money. Far better we try to recruit all the retiring people into the hobby, if they are looking for an interest.

Times really do change, at one time the Blacksmith, Swordsmith, Armourer, Stone Mason, Thatcher, Baker, Bowyer or Fletcher were the people you needed in your village, Not any more, It still amazes me that the people with the skills in some countries were regarded as lower class or caste because they were making stuff!

We still try to screw a deal out of a plumber, electrician or boiler engineer, not because of their lowly skills, far below our own superior abilities, but because somewhere buried inside us is the feeling that they are just Artisans and don't really deserve to be paid so much for their skills. (Until your boiler blows up on Christmas eve!.)

Most of us modellers do possess those practical abilities and like Dave says have the ability to learn quite well practical skills when we need them, like when we are starting off and don't have much money.

I was a Copper till I was badly injured on duty, but I had since the age of 5 loved making things, it certainly didn't come from my parents, but making models and teaching myself how to do jobs in and around the house because I couldn't afford to pay someone meant that I had the skills set to become a Teacher, first a workshop Technician, then a Degree in Engineering, then a Cert Ed and so I absolutely know that teaching myself how to do things and making models all my life got me the job that I did till retirement…Head of Design and Technology, Woodwork, Metalwork and Product Design up to Uni level.

Don't knock being a modeller, its a great hobby……IF….you want to do it.

Cheers…………RON.

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