John McEwan saw my post about NB Dover from a zillion years ago (in blog years) and asks:
1937 Town Class, large Woolwich motorboat Dover. My father is interested in building a model of this particular Harland and Wolff boat. Where would we get plans of the vessel to scale down?
I dunno. There must be loads of people who know the answer, but I don't. I'm sorry to let you down. Any suggestions, Buttoneers?
One possibility is A.M. Models, who actually offer to build scale models of particular narrowboats themselves.
(I don't know what the 'M' of A.M. Models represents. Could it be, by any chance, er, McEwan, as in 'John McEwan'? If so, John knows rather more than me.)
Another is Roger Fuller. As his building of Hadar shows, Roger relishes the chance to build models of old narrowboats. Although in his case he builds them at 1:1 scale.
Update 1: Many thanks to both George Boyle and Colin Marshall for reminding me about Laurence Hogg's excellent source of narrowboat plans:
www.laurencehoggproductions.co.uk/plans.htm
That led me to call Laurence (his phone number's on his site and he's always willing to speak), and he reminded me about his special Ebay shop, Train Boat Depot, where you can buy them online with just a mouse-click. His plans are mostly 1/24 scale (1/2" to 1ft), making a 3ft model of a full-sized narrowboat.
Update 2: I just remembered that I wrote about Laurence's plans a couple of years ago.
Hi - it's Sam here, who produced the series, 'Narrow Boat' and 'Narrow Boat Afloat'. We bought our plans from Lawrence Hogg, but I guess my reply is a little late now! Hope the model went/is going ok.
Best,
Sam Green
ex nb Dover
Posted by: Sam Green | Sunday, 14 June 2009 at 06:12 PM
I think Lawrence Hogg used to supply good scale drawings of Big Woolwich and Big Northwich boats. A Google for his name should find him especially if you add video to the Google.
George ex nb Alton
Posted by: George | Wednesday, 27 August 2008 at 08:55 AM