Oh dear. The hull had been more or less stripped out and Nitromors had made serious inroads into the original yellow finish. Sponson brackets had been drilled out to remove the screws, leaving large holes in the aluminium. The motor had a broken crankshaft, no piston, and a hole where the combustion chamber used to be. In case it is thought that the news was all bad, everything that had been taken off, or out of the hull had been saved, so in a way it was ‘all there’, if in a bit of a state.

This was another case where there was no dilemma about the degree of restoration required, as the previous action now dictated a complete refurbishment from scratch. The first difficulty was getting the fuel tank and very complex fuel ‘knock off’ out of the hull. A series of links, pins, screws and nuts, were all set solid with 40-year-old castor oil. Brute force was not an option, so thinners and gentle persuasion got me there in the end. Getting the congealed fuel out of the tank and fuel cock required a very long soak in thinners, with what came out looking very unappetising.

The major problem was how to get rid of all the old paint from the inside of a wooden hull, and here I have a fairly radical procedure. Pick all the paint out of the screw holes, take out the screws and gently remove the deck. So much easier to strip paint from an open hull. Only problem was that no stripper would touch the primer that Stan had used. Eventually it had to be dissolved and washed out with thinners. What a messy job that was.

Getting down to the bare wood revealed some bad news with obvious signs of a bonfire, damaged wood and dozens of redundant holes. Oddly, I now had to reassemble the entire boat to see what holes were current and what needed filling. With all the repairs completed, the inside of the hull was primed and sprayed yellow to match the original colour. Yellow and a pale blue were the colours of the St Albans Club that Stan joined later in his career. The deck was treated in the same way and then glued and screwed back on. Painting the outer surfaces is something of a doddle compared with the insides, and soon there was something resembling a complete hull ready for all the additional parts.

The hull was now finished down to an original prop that was still on the shaft, but no engine. Here I was seriously stuck, as the main bearing could not be replicated, despite many enquiries and adverts, which brought everything to a standstill. Last October, a knight in shining white workshop coat emerged. Ron Hankins offered to sort out the problem of the bearing and then make a new crankshaft to suit. Having made a new shaft he then thought that a piston was required, with some rings for compression, and of course a combustion chamber insert to suit. The motor has a most unusual clutch on the flywheel, which he got working, and then fitted to the new crank, finishing the whole thing off with a coupling to match up with the original cardan shaft.

I picked up the complete motor at the beginning of February and Ron had made a superb job of resurrecting it from the box of bits I had passed to him. Without Ron I am not sure the project would have ever been completed, so my grateful thanks to him for his efforts and interest.

With the motor to hand, it was the work of minutes to bolt the mounting plates on and get it back into the hull. Everything fitted perfectly, which was something of a relief after all the work. The only element that is missing is an exhaust system. What was used in the boat’s last incarnation was not an option as this had not worked and was what had set fire to the boat. No pictures exist with this earlier motor in, so nothing to go on at present, which will require a little more thought and research before metal is cut.