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.