Half Models
Half models today are mostly seen as adornments to office walls or yacht club rooms and many excellent examples can be seen in such places. Beautifully crafted and polished or painted, they last for years and are a wonderful way of preserving yachting history as design trends and measurement rules and even perhaps fashion, changes the shapes of the vessels we loved as the years go by. Skene's Elements of Yacht Design has a page devoted to pictures of half models of America's Cup challengers and defenders which hang on a wall at the New York Yacht Club. Some recent half models are in the accompanying photographs.
Looking at such displays is a constant reminder that we live in a changing world when we examine the lines, or see a half model of a design we admired when young and wonder today, how we could ever have been attracted to that convex sheer, or that excessive tumble home in the transom.
In the past half models were not only an adornment; but an essential tool in building a boat. A shipwright or designer would carve the shape of the vessel from timber by eye to a suitable scale. Then when he reckoned he had got it right the half model would be sawn athwartships at the stations to get the half sections to allow the lines to be lofted by the loftsman. Later this process was replaced by draftsmen preparing the lines drawing and taking out a table of offsets to start the loftsman on his job. Nowdays the whole process can be done at the computer screen and a table of offsets produced to allow building to commence. As a matter of interest and with no particular reference to this page, and to indicate that income is not my sole emphasis, I still often draw lines in the old way and laboriously take out the offsets. The benefit of this is that when I do this you get something included in your design drawings which your grand children can wonder at or even boast about.
To provide a link to the past and also a service to those who wish to puncture the walls of their office or lounge room to hang a half model, we manufacture half models using the latest technology of the previous centuries as well as the present just arrived century. Generally our half models fall into four categories all mounted on timber bases:-
- Traditional laminated half models up to sheer level to a required scale.
- As above but with coach house/wheelhouse/coamings etc.
- Fully detailed with laid decks, winches, grab rails, hatch covers, etc and hull finished in anti fouling, boottop and topsides stripes etc. ( Modern vulgar despoiling of topsides graphics can be accommodated but at enormous cost and long delay in delivery).
- Trophy sized half models of popular, even best forgotten and declining classes can also be supplied. In the latter two categories provided you can remember what they looked like and can provide photographs, lines, something better than a waved arm and a series of "you knows" and a vague description we can have a crack at making a half model for you.
You will appreciate that it is not possible to quote a price on these half models because of the differing extent of the work involved; but we are always willing to discuss your needs and quantities and quote a price by steam telephone or by email.
