Restoration and repair – Page 47

Ian Baird restores a 1961 Burnham on Sea motor launch

Boat Building Academy graduate Ian Baird’s first professional commission is nearly ready to take to the water after an extensive restoration.

Yoma II is a 1961 Burnham on Sea Motor Boat Company-built vessel based on theirSturdy 16 model of the time. However Yoma was built at 14ft to the owner’s specification. ‘We think the original owner, Tony Palmer commissioned a smaller boat to make her more manoeuverable around the small harbour of her home port of West Bay in Dorset‘, says Ian.

‘This was a difficult restoration to take on as a first job. Yoma’s bottom had completely rotted out and everything from the fifth plank down from the gunwales had to be replaced.

‘Working as a one-man band isn’t easy, but I had help from some of the former BBA students from my 2010 course to get through the more difficult tasks, and she is now ready to go once her engine, an original 1.5hp two-stroke Stuart-Turner, has been put back in.’

Her current owner, John Palmer, will continue to use her from West Bay as the tender to Yoma, a locally-built gentleman’s motor launch built in 1921.

While on the BBA course Ian Baird built the replica Dorset lobster and crab boat named Witch of Worbarrow – see an earlier post on this project here.

Projects at Stirling and Son, autumn 2011

Click on the thumbnails for bigger images

Those busy folks at Stirling and Son have been getting on with an amazing range of projects. Building and marketing beautiful small traditional clinker-built dinghies is one thing, rowing to Magnetic North Pole is another, but how about building lock gates or appearing in adverts for soap? All this and a regular round of repair and restoration jobs are all in a day’s work for those Stirlings…

As the photo above shows (click on the thumbnail for a much larger image) the hull of the Stirling & Son Victorian yacht named Integrity is complete, and the rudder has been hung. The mast has also been hewn from a tree selected in a local forest. I say Integrity looks amazing and I believe she is available for sale.
Will has taken the 14ft sailing dinghy out for a trial. It was fairly windy, so he began with two reefs, and later shook them out as the wind fell and sailed under all plain sail. He reports that it was so much fun they kept sailing on past high tide – and it was a pretty muddy business getting her back out…
In a surprise non-boat project, Stirling and Son are building a new lock gate and cantilever bridge in oak for the Tavistock Canal. Due to the size of the timbers and the poor access, both have to be assembled in the shed, dismantled and then taken to the site in order to rebuild them in position. I guess it makes sense, for there’s no doubt that anyone who can build a Victorian-style yacht knows something about working with oak.
And what about the soap? From the Stirling & Son newsletter I gather the makers of Dove soap products decided that Will should be the subject of a shower product advert, and so their ad agency visited with a film crew.

Stirling & Son is based at Tavistock, Devon and can be contacted via the website at www.stirlingandson.co.uk or by ‘phone on 01822 614259.

Mike Lowson helps rescue an unusual pram from becoming a prize-winning flowerbed

Out here in what we laughingly call the real world, I think we know that boat restoration isn’t all about swept teak decks, priceless customised bronze castings and acres of spotless Dacron subtly shaded to imitate the best Egyptian cotton.

But I was nevertheless tickled to hear that Aberdeenshire-based boat builder Mike Lowson, proprietor of Northboats, has helped save a 40-year old pram dinghy from becoming a flower planter in the Moray town of Forres.

The 11ft 6in dinghy was apparently built in the late ’60s or early ’70s by personnel at RAF Kinloss, a few miles from Forres, for use by the Kinloss base’s angling club. The boat spent most of its life at a nearby inland loch.

With the announcement earlier this year that the base was to close, the boat was earmarked to become firewood or to end its days in the town as an ornamental flower bed – Forres is a five-time overall UK Britain in Bloom winner.

‘A former employee at the base heard of the plan and, thankfully, rescued her from an ignominious fate that no wooden boat should face,’ Mike told intheboatshed.net. ‘He and his son then began stripping her back to start the process of making her fit for a return to angling duties.’

Mike was asked to re-frame her and to tackle some of the other deficiencies caused by the ravages of time.

‘The boat was rustically built, to put it politely, and the utility-timber planking is not of the best, but by carefully removing the remaining cracked frames one at a time to keep her shape, I was able to fit new frames of Scottish oak, traditionally nailed and roved in place.

‘I also added a couple of new floors, too, plus a new aft seat in matching oak and a new quarter-knee to replace one that was missing.’

The boat’s owners now intend to make the boat watertight and return her to her original mooring.

Mike added: ‘She is much too interesting to be scrapped and I look forward to her being filled with fresh-caught brown trout rather than begonias and geraniums.’

Mike is a 2008 graduate of the Boat Building Academy at Lyme Regis, and in January 2009 set up Northboats near Insch, some 30 miles north-west of Aberdeen.

Currently, he is completing a faering built to Iain Oughtred’s Elf design, restoring a small yacht tender and refitting a 35-year-old Westerly Centaur.

Mike Lowson can be contacted via his business’s website at www.northboats.co.uk.

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