One of my brothers has been clearing out dad's basement since he went into a nursing home and found a box of my earliest efforts at ship modelling dating from high school, so more than 40 years ago! John found most of the keel and frames from a planned ironclad ram loosely based on Thunderchild from H.G. Well's War of the Worlds. The hull cross sections aren't bad but planking it was beyond my skills then so it's tin ram blade never saw use. Another find was a 1/72 scale pine and balsa hull based on a 1940s 1/36 plan of an RAF Vosper Rescue launch. An uncle had started the 1/36 model and the plan and pieces had been in my grandmother's attic for a few decades. I never did make the superstructure but installed motor, prop and rudder and ran it on a tether with an awful camo scheme. It's salvageable as an RC boat with a microservo for the rudder. The last item was the front 1/3 of a planned motorized semi-scale nuclear sub, that was to be a surface runner on a tether. The hull was made from very hard wood-based rolls from a copier, almost like mdf. They were glassed inside and out, and the bow and stern were carved, glassed and plugged into the tubes. The stern section, yet to be found, had no external prop. The prop was in an internal chamber soldered from tin plate. 4 external scoops ahead of the cruciform rudder and stern planes were to bring water to the chamber via copper pipes and there was a larger diameter pipe for the water to exit. The sub wasn't finished when I left home for college and I had completely forgotten about it. After no ship model building for 12 years (but lots of naval wargaming) I joined the first international warship combat club in 1984 and built my first RC combat model, HMS Terror.
The thumbnail of that ironclad ram closeup initially made me think of a partially sunken ship, slowly settling into the table....
I briefly thought of trying to fix it but it was used as kindling in the fireplace. I was at the family home 2 weeks ago but the rest of the sub has yet to surface from dad's basement
I've still got my yellow plastic Seaview sub model from the mid-1960s. The prop ran on a rubber band and the sub fired spring loaded yellow torpedoes. You could set the stern planes to make it dive and it would resurface after the prop stopped because it was slightly positively buoyant - made it to the bottom of my uncle's 8' deep pool. There are a couple of wind-up tinplate subs still in dad's basement. One was made in Japan and the other in West Germany. Both had rubber plugs at the stern so you could add enough water to the hull to make them barely positively bouyant, set the rudder and the forward dive planes, wind them up and let them go. Unfortunately putting water inside eventually rusted the clockwork mechanism so they no longer run.
