The Dark Peak Shipyard

 Formerly known as High Peak Boatyard has been busy recently.

Since completion of the Napoleon back in April, I have indulged a few flights of fancy. I was bored on a night shift recently so I did what most people seem to do these days and started trawling Google where I came across Powercats. Curiosity piqued, I delved further, doodled a bit then built this, the Thomas O'Malley (alleycat) in roughly 1/24 scale.


Just short of a bit of cosmetic fettling and it's good to go with it's massive twin pretend V8's

Whilst building Thomas, I was reading a fictional novel about the German invasion of Britain in 1940 and I got interested in Kriegsmarine landing vessels so I googled them and found out all about MFP's (Marinefährprahmen). Interesting if a little impractical but interesting enough to build a non functional model of one in 1/76 scale.



So after boring my work colleagues half to death with tales of my builds (16 so far) I was challenged to build something unusual. No change there then.

The challenge was to build a fully functional model of a Latvian Navy Skrunda class SWATH type patrol boat. What the hell is one of those you may ask. So did I.


This. Nice innit? They have five of them, all named after cities or important events in Latvian history.


and this is my model in 1/35 scale, 2 months on. P-10 LV Riga, the imaginary 6th of the class almost ready to go.


The challenger (or customer seeing as he's paid for it all) is over the moon with it and to be honest, so am I. It's a good job it's turned out OK because he now tells me he's planning to take it to Latvia (where he's from) to sail it on the Baltic alongside the real thing some time next year. I've told him if he does then I want pictures... loads of them.

By strange coincidence, all my builds seem to end up more or less the same size regardless of scale - between 800 and 850mm long. Secretly I know that this is so they will fit in the boot of my car but I like to pretend that spooky forces are at work 

Very pleased to see that someone else is still building. I thought everyone had converted to model aircraft or maybe computer games.

Barrie

Well I thought this was going to be the LV Riga's finished article photoshoot but I just realised I've still got some decals to apply.
Whatever. It's not going to look much different so this is basically "it" and the 'customer' is ecstatic about it and wants to take posession "Right Now" and that makes me very happy.




Now....
What can I build next?