A long story! (A VERY long story!)
The DelPrado partworks kit of the Bounty was (I think) first produced back around 1996 – and I only think that because some other contributor mentioned that he was building his back then. Anyway, my younger brother got this kit at the same time that he convinced me to buy a second or third hand Honda Spacy scooter off him. The deal was that I should build the model for him and he, being the mechanical one in the family would service and maintain the scooter for me.
I got on with building the kit (this being my second wooden ship after the Constructo Grimsby and before my own DelPrado Victory). Long story short, the Spacy eventually went off in the back of a skip still waiting for the replacement exhaust which he had at his home but ‘forgot all about’.
At that point in a brotherly dispute I thought “Why should I?” and the poor Bounty was consigned to the attic where she remained all complete except for the second half of the sails to be finished and the corresponding rigging and crew figures.
Present day, twenty six years later, (there were one hundred parts in the collection so lets say it took about two years to build). My brother has been in hospital for some months. Soon after the New Year he began to have trouble swallowing food and drink and eventually was admitted for tests on the growing blockage in his throat, the result unfortunately was the C word. He’s now undergone a first course of radiotherapy which we all hope will be successful but we won’t know for a few weeks yet. He’s actually feeling a little more like his old self now that they have got his feeding regime correct (he’s suffered with Crohn’s disease for decades too) and his usual greeting is “Have you done my boat yet?” so to cheer him up a little more that’s what I’ve been working on these last few months.
The photo below is of my attic (the bit that isn’t my workbench that is), and this shows an approximation of where the Bounty has been for those twenty six years! This is actually a ‘sanitised’ pic – I thought I’d taken one of the actual conditions but can’t find it on the SD card so I couldn’t have. She was actually in a much more precarious balancing act than this and didn’t have any sails on the mainmast either. This was relatively OK until we had solar panels installed back in December when the cables and electrical gubbins were installed in the attic during which the poor Bounty suffered some damage, nothing too major but some broken rigging and missing window frames on one of the quarter-badges together with the stern decoration.
So this short(ish) diary will be a record of how I managed to repair and complete this model for my brother and mainly how I overcame the awfully vague kit instructions with some help from the web. I’m beginning to think this thing has got more rigging on her than the ruddy Victory!
Hopefully some of what I’ve discovered will be of use to others who might still have this same kit hanging around – when it was released it was billed as a beginners kit that anyone could create – yeah right!
See you all soon.

Robin.

Many thanks for those kind words Mark. We are hoping for the best although the treatment so far is not proving as successful as we would have liked. It's an even bigger impetus for me to make this model as special as I can!

Photo 1 was again taken ‘after the fact’ so to speak as I didn’t take any specific photos of the actual damage incurred during the Bounty’s long exile to the attic! There were a few broken rigging threads around the masts, more than likely caused not by her movement during the solar panel installation but due to twenty six years of summer heat (the attic gets well over 100F during a heatwave) to almost freezing in the depths of winter – this plays havoc with tight rigging especially when the knots have been super glued to prevent them coming loose! The Mizzen Boom tackle shown by the two arrows top left was hanging over the stern as the ropes up to the boom had broken off, the cast metal stern decoration shown at bottom left was not only missing, including the two metal ‘swirls’ at both corners, but when I eventually found it, it was snapped in half and the Quarter Badge window frames shown here on the starboard side were missing completely from the port. This of course was all discovered after a long and very careful dusting of the decks and masts/spars with a selection of very soft paintbrushes (not quite careful enough for a couple more of the rigging threads!)
After removing the model from her dangerous balancing act and over to the workbench, a meticulous search down through the many boxes she had been sitting on revealed the two bits of the stern decoration and a single window frame from the Badge. The metal decoration was repaired by gluing the two parts back to the wooden stern, not with super glue as before but with a two part epoxy for extra strength. Of the swirls – no sign of them (yet) but I do have a Victory based contingency plan for those!
After repairing what I could I made up two new wooden window frames using the one I’d found as a template and routering the windows out of some scrap plywood which I suspect actually came from either the Bounty or my Victory (being the ‘sprue’ from the parts in the kit). It wasn’t perfect but didn’t look too bad compared to the other side of the ship. I then needed to correct an unfortunate mistake I’d made all those years ago. To try and get some details on the Bounty’s rigging I went looking on the internet and came across a website called Academia.edu. This was an educational resource containing a vast collection of downloadable books in pdf. Among them I found just what I had been looking at on ebay but wasn’t going to pay ridiculous prices for: The Anatomy of the Ship: The Armed Transport Vessel Bounty! I wasn’t actually going to download it as I was asked to register my details and didn’t want to bother with all that so I backed out of the site to look elsewhere. The following day I was very surprised to not only find an email from the site welcoming me, but also the downloaded pdf of the book as well! The entire book was there apart that is for one page that would have been very useful – the index page for all the rigging ropes that appear on the main drawing. Without that index I could at least work out roughly where the various running rigging went to and from where, but not necessarily the exact belaying pin where it was tied off. That said, it was a whole lot more info than I’d had before. The rigging instructions in the DelPrado magazines have three ‘slight’ problems – one, the instructions are more often than not very vague, two, after perusing the anatomy of the ship book they are often actually inaccurate and three, in some cases they are physically impossible to follow! An example is the fore and aft sails between the fore mast and main mast – these are suspended from the standing rigging stays which is fair enough but the bottom corners of the sails are tied directly to the fore mast and main mast. In the case of the fore mast again, fair enough but the ropes going to the rearward main mast would have to pass through the mainsails to get there!
As for that unfortunate mistake from all those years back, Photo 2 is a simplified rendering of part of the rigging instructions. It shows a pair of thin ropes coming from the main sail to the fore mast. I assumed that this was from the centre of the sail so that’s what I did as seen in Photo 3 (although I did wonder why they went to a double block and not a single at the time!) Once I had those drawings from the pdf it was obvious that those ropes actually came from the side edges of the sails and not from the centre at all! In fact, checking out the instruction photos under a magnifier, they did show the correct arrangement – in my defence, those photos are about two and a half inches by two inches in size, show most of the entire ship against a light back ground and I didn’t have reading glasses back then! These ropes are actually called the “Bowlines” (as they run from the sails towards the bows) and are used to keep the forward face of the square sails taut when the ship is sailing into the wind (presumably as opposed to letting the sails billow backwards into the shrouds and knocking some poor sailor overboard?)
Anyway, after some snipping off and some new threads put in, the first of the foresails was corrected as shown in Photos 4 and 5.
In the next instalment, making those bowlines and taking the corrected ropes to their proper destination (along with a lot of their mates!)
Until then Happy Modelling again!

Robin.