Last Saturday, I spent 3 hours in a car park. Well, more specifically, parking cars for the KMBC annual lifeboat day. I had my hi-viz jacket to protect me from the chilly wind and an RNLI baseball cap so I looked quite the part.
This means I saw a lot of boats briefly through the back windows of cars. By the time I decided that pretty much everyone who was coming had arrived, and some of them had already left, the boats were on the water.
One model that aroused my interest more than most was a scratchbuild retrieval system for the newest boat in the RNLI fleet - the Shannon. This amazing waterproof tractor and long trailer combination makes for a really striking model and not one you'll find on the shelf in kit form any time soon!
While boats are the main interest, the ancillary equipment is far harder to build and yet just as fascinating. The boat can be hailed up the channel on the trailer and then the whole lot spun around ready to be re-deployed quickly. An amazing bit of engineering.
Shows are very handy ways to find out details for a future build too. I bought one of these German lifeboats in kit form recently at a bargain price. I'd seen another members model and liked it a lot jumped at the chance to pick up the kit. Now I have a pretty good idea how the mechanical and electronic bits can be fitted in. All I need to do is fit the building into my schedule. That and work out why I bought an little RNLI bucket...
My goodness Phil, you're making models of 'foreign stuff'?
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