Monday 30 December 2019

Hillman Imp car parts



For some years now I have been producing a range of metal parts suitable for the Hillman Imp car, circa 1963 to 1975, they are produced in alloy, mild and stainless steel.

Send me your email to receive a Word document with the parts on it.

Below is an engine block anti oil surge plate.


Seen here is a batch of twin Stromberg Carburetor heat shields.


Below are stainless steel pressed saddles to hold the steering rack in place.


In stock now, parts can be shipped World wide.

Sunday 29 December 2019

The Argie 10 kit is collected

This will be the last kit order and for the year 2019, being as it was collected on Christmas Eve there will be no chance to ship an Argie 15 kit that is also on order until mid January 2020.

Orders for January shipment can be taken now.

Roy

Saturday 7 December 2019

The Cape Cutter 19 drop keel

We will have pricing on the mild steel drop keel next week, it could also be supplied in stainless steel?



The Cape Cutter 19 kit we supplied to Ian down in Picton, New Zealand also contained a drop keel that we supplied.


Ian built his boat, named it Tiptoe, here it is when he launched it.

Please contact me for prices.

Roy

Tuesday 19 November 2019

Chris Sutton and friends build a St Ayles Skiff in Hout Bay

Chris was one of the members who raised his hand in accepting the idea to form a club rowing section, he also was the main driver behind the building program.


Chris is in the grey sweater, he is also the HBYC club president. The clubs commodore of sailing is Paul who is with Chris, it was Pauls idea to build a St Ayles Skiff in the first place.


Once we had supplied  the CNC plywood kit and epoxies members started to cut the hull frame sections out.


A building platform was used as the workbench to cut the frames free.


Chris and the members soon had the frames set up, in this image he is showing me a laminated bow section he has made.


The clubs lower floor was used to build the St Ayles Skiff on, note the MDF floor covering to protect the carpet.


Chris again with a laminated bow or stern section.


Please contact the HBYC or myself for information on the club and a kit.

Roy


St Ayles Skiff new club group in Hout Bay, South Africa

The Hout Bay Yacht Club got off to a great start with the building of hull number one and a rowing group was soon established to take the boat out into the bay on regular rowing sessions.


The HBYC has since formed a special rowing section to the main club, this means that special membership rates are on offer to those who want to take up the sport of rowing.

Please contact the HBYC for more information.

Monday 11 November 2019

Yacht Figaro V , an update

News is in from Angelo Lavranos in that he saw Figaro V being built at the Souters yard and under construction at the same time as some of his designs done when he was working at the Angus Primrose yacht design office.

Roy,

Roy,


I watched Figaro V being built at Souters were we were also having our designs built, In 1969. Heavy !

All the Figaro's were for Bill Snaith, and all barring the last one (F VI I think, Brit Chance design) were under the USA CCA Rule. I think he died while the last one was being built.

The most famous one was an S&S design.  See the book "Across the Western Ocean" by Bill Snaith., with Norrie Hoyt on board.   A very funny read about the  Transatlantic Race  Newport - Cowes.

Yes, I was working for Angus P.  Max Aitkins'  Alan Gurney designed Crusade was built alongside Figaro.

Cheers,
Angelo

Figaro V a classic sailing yacht with heritage

An update of a previous entry due to a new picture coming to light,are there any more out there?

R McB


Hello Roy,
I came across your blog a day or so ago.

Your picture of Figaro under sail is of Figaro IV, designed by my dad and Bob Derecktor and built in D's Mamaroneck yard.

My dad died while V was still under construction, my older brother and I did some of the finishing work on her but she was never sailed by the family.

She looks to be in good hands now, and has managed to get herself pretty far from home waters.

THe main thing WTS did with Coke was design that curvy line logo they use now. They tweaked the bottle and some vending machine stuff too according to my bro. Lowey/Snaith also created the red stripes the Coast Guard uses ("everyone things we're the navy..." and came up with the name EXXON.

I think I've seen your kits in a shop in Anacortes WA.

all the best,  skip snaith


 A correction to which Figaro is the white boat has been made. Roy, thanks for your valued information Skip.
What a fine picture! thats Figaro IV on the left,check out how close the racing was,my thanks to George Wenman for finding the book the picture was published in and well done for recognising the boat. The picture was found in the book The Sailors World, Beiser/A Ridge Press Book/Hamlyn,my thanks to them. The photo is on pages 62 and 63,the other yacht is named Bay Bea. The picture was taken by Stanley Rosenfeld,the book is not dated but a mention to the 1970  Bermuda Race on page 13 exists (yacht Jubilee) so this picture pre dates then?

The bottle design said to be created by yacht Figaro V owner William Snaith.


Coca Cola tray and bottle pictures.





Figaro V at her HBYC marina mooring.


Thats Figaro V with the all white hull and transom.The hull is moulded mahogany to 7/8" thick,the entire backbone of the boat from stem to stern is a stainless steel fabrication,the boat is massivly strong,now largly restored to a high standard by Charles her owner for the last ten years or so? Figaro V was built in 1969 by the English yard Souters.

This is the story about William Snaith,a man who sailed as an amature but was well up with the pros,he won most events he went into,all excepting the one,which he came second in,that was The Fastnet Race,to ensure he would eventually win this race he had Derecktor of USA design him a new fifty foot yacht,it was to be the fifth in the line called Figaro,so he named it Figaro V,the boat never did win the Fastnet for William Snaith as he died while it was still under construction at Souters in the UK,Figaro V is safe and on the marina at Hout Bay.I was told a rumour that William designed the Coca Cola bottle,such a distintive shape seen world wide,I have yet to find writen proof that he did actualy pen the design but given the fact he was the chief Designer/Partner from the company that produced the shape,its clear he had a hand in it,such is fame.

Park Avenue, New York City's most famous boulevard, is a changed place. The sidewalks where rich sports, dowagers and Pomeranians once walked are crowded with commerce. The glass-faced buildings lining the sidewalks stand tall, sterile and inhuman. There are scarcely enough baroque outcroppings left to accommodate the pigeons. The career women of Park Avenue are far better-looking than the dowagers of yore—their legs are trimmer and they carry their bosoms higher—but they are glass-faced like the buildings. In offices along the avenue the most eyecatching window display often is a portrait gallery of executives, each face grim enough to repel children and frozen sufficiently by Bachrach to qualify for a place in Madame Tussaud's waxworks.

But in one office on the east side of Park Avenue, nine floors up, there is one important executive whose face has not yet been frozen by Bachrach or anyone else. He is a Renaissance caveman named William Snaith. At age 58, Bill Snaith does not look like a Park Avenue man of distinction, nor does he act the part. He wears his hair longer than an executive should. His brindle moustache is shaggy and tends to wiggle recklessly around his face. At his desk Snaith` usually talks soberly, but when a matter at hand seems to be getting too serious he is apt to throw a leg over the arm of his chair and let go a freshet of Groucho Marxist nonsense.

Despite the burdens of his position, Snaith's ego is still full-blown; the panting animal in him has not yet succumbed. He is equally comfortable among high-and lowbrows, for his interests run the gamut. When Beethoven's Pastoral is done right, he applauds; when Rob Gardner of the Mets wins a 10-hitter, he cheers; when he notices ladies' hemlines inching upward, he rejoices openly. Given the right breaks in life, Snaith might have capitalized on his broad tastes and gregariousness by becoming a bartender. By the fate of things, he became instead an architect, decorator, designer, consumer analyst, painter, critic, writer, raconteur, casual musician, popular after-dinner speaker and ocean sailor. More specifically, he became managing partner in the firm of Raymond Loewy/William Snaith Inc.—a company that deals largely in industrial design but has more sidelines than a hock shop.

A company name like Raymond Loewy/William Snaith Inc., of course, sticks in the throat more easily than in the mind. Although most people are barely aware of the company, its impact is considerable. When a housewife spends money at spiffy marts like Bloomingdale's and Lord & Taylor, she is doing so in a seductive environment conceived by Loewy/Snaith. If a husband quits his job at a corrugated-box factory, it may be because he is tired of operating a cutter-creaser-stripper machine designed by Loewy/Snaith. In the near future if you, gentle reader, are mugged while riding on the New York City transit system, you will probably regain consciousness in a pool of your own blood, staring up at the new subway coachwork and backlit advertising panels designed by Loewy/Snaith. If you have ever consumed Shreddies or Oysterettes, Old Forester or Early Times, if you have used aureomycin hog cholera vaccine, or if you have ever bought a water-jet massager for your gums, you have been under the influence of Loewy/Snaith. One way to get away from Loewy/Snaith might be to cast yourself adrift on the sea, but even then you could not be certain. Indeed, if in a mid-Atlantic gale you should hear above the wind song and hiss of the sea a voice bawling out succinctly, "Goddam-it," it is a good bet that just beyond the next swell you would find Bill Snaith at the helm of his yawl Figaro IV.

For the past 20 years, in one or another of his four Figaros, Snaith has spent much of his time at sea, cruising and racing. He has been dismasted off Montauk and dis-keeled in the Gulf Stream. He has ghosted past Diamond Head and has slid on the scend of mid-Atlantic seas at better than 12 knots. He has often been hung up on Bahama shoals and has sat for hours in the windless languor of Long Island Sound. He has suffered in the slap-chop of the shallow North Sea, and he has wandered lost north of Scotland in The Bore off Mull Head. He came close to breaking his back once in the English Channel and nearly broke an arm trying to harpoon a mola mola in the waters off—of all exotic places—Greenwich, Conn. Thinking over his misadventures, Snaith says, "I have one motto which I keep repeating to the irritation of my loved ones: 'Any man who does not cross a starting line early at least once a season and who does not go aground while cruising at least once a year isn't really trying.' "

Between misadventures like these, Snaith has sailed many a pleasant mile through days of sun and wind, with everything shipshape, his socks dry and his position known, but when it comes to remembering anything about such revoltingly normal and untrying times his sense of recall is about even with that of a newt. But he has total recall about the miseries, humiliations and near disasters he has suffered at sea.

For once in his life Bill Snaith was not among the skippers dropping anchor in Bermuda's Hamilton Harbor two weeks ago. He was under doctor's orders to take it easy for a while. But if you ask him about other Bermuda races, in which he has competed seven times, offhand he is likely to say: "I think I have been second, and fourth, and seventh, and lousy." He took first place in the Transatlantic Race to Sweden in '60, he was captain of the winning American Admiral's Cup team in '61 and first overall on the Southern Ocean Racing Circuit last year. Beyond these major victories, he is hard put to remember just what he was up to in any given year or how he fared as a racing skipper.

Too often a man who goes to sea for the love of it becomes in time a very dull fellow. Indeed, one of the easiest ways to plumb the depths of boredom is to ask a well-soaked skipper whether he has ever sailed in the tide race off New London or in the gut between Scylla and Charybdis. The mere mention of these classical names will release a flood of unintriguing episodes. "Oh, by God," the skipper will exclaim. "Indeed I know the Race and the gut off Scylla. I was stemming the tide once in the Race—or was it off Scylla? I forget. But anyway, the wind was force 7, and the crew had just split the last grunion on board. And, even with the grunion gone, we still made it through. You could never guess how. We simply riff-raffed a spud to the countertop. Then we pleated a weevil through the stallion, routed it around the stamen and fleeced it to the mullion just forward of the parboil. We had a time, but it was nothing compared to the year before off Scylla. Or was it the Race? Anyway,..."

After laboring as a deckhand for years and being force-fed sailing talk in her off-hours, the wife of one skipper said recently and wearily, "I was living with my so-called husband Jack before he married his first boat. He has married two more since, but he still remembers his first love. He says she had the damndest spreaders he ever saw on anything her size."

In some extraordinary way, in a short period of 20 years, Bill Snaith has become a very fine amateur skipper without alienating his family or friends or boring casual acquaintances. The sea game remains merely one of the major ingredients in the mess of enthusiasms that are stewing within him. He can talk boat talk, but it is not his only tongue. Half a year ago Snaith packaged the day-by-day logs of two of his transoceanic trips—one cruise and one race—in book form for public consumption. The book, Across the Western Ocean, has been well received by sailors but, more significantly, it has even been read for pleasure by nonsailors.What a fine picture! thats Figaro V on the left,check out how close the racing was,my thanks to George Wenman for finding the book the picture was published in and well done for recognising the boat. The picture was found in the book The Sailors World, Beiser/A Ridge Press Book/Hamlyn,my thanks to them. The photo is on pages 62 and 63,the other yacht is nmaed Bay Bea,

Tuesday 22 October 2019

Proteus 106 kit set pack

The image shows a Proteus 106 kit that was loaded for a road delivery.



When we need to ship by sea the plys can be split into pack sized and boxed, then steel band strapped for security.

Monday 21 October 2019

Lavranos Proteus 106 sailing catamaran news

Angelo Lavranos met with me two days back, we discussed the way forward with his Proteus 106 cat design?


Angelo has reached an age when it is time to retire, he may do select designs that suit him in the future, he will no longer have the time available to support his existing designs such as the Proteus 106.

As the CNC cut files are complete and he will still be able to supply a kit buyer the required plans as a PDF this means we can still offer the design and an as a cut package.


Pricing, we are now offering the kits cut from either WBP ( water proof and boil proof ) hard wood plys and okoume marine plys, the WBP grade saves around twenty five percent over the okoume marine plys.

https://ckdboats.blogspot.com/2017/10/proteus-106-in-water.html

Please contact me for pricing, a PDF pricing which was done early 2020 is availble.

Sunday 2 June 2019

Automobile Year book collection



Automobile Year volumes 1953-54 which was the first one to 2012-13.

Sold as a collection which is sixty years. ( now with a new home )

They are all in English, two early volumes exist in French which are not included in this offer and will be sold in another offer.

The price is 1550 pounds, buyer pays for shipping.

They are in Cape Town, South Africa.

Friday 10 May 2019

Yacht and Boat parts for sale

Over a number of years I have collected a varied range of marine products.

CKD Boats cc Boat & Yacht parts

The above is a Facebook name to a new site that I have startted.

On that site are brand names such as North Sails, Harken, Lewmar, Volvo, BMW, BMW/Hatz, Hurth, ZF, B and G , Autohelm, and a host of other well known names.

You may find what you are looking for if you visit the Facebook site/

Roy

Tuesday 30 April 2019

Okoume Marine Plywood

Most of the boat kits we supply use the better grade of plywood that is made from okoume veneers.


Genuine marine ply to BS1088 should have a uniform layer of veneer thicknesses.

We use plys from various countries, Spain and France  being two of the countries.


Sunday 14 April 2019

The Optimist training dinghy

The smallest boat we supply will be the Optimist dinghy.

The kit we offer has a builders jig which can be re used and is a good offer for clubs to build one after another.


We can also supply the North Sail and Harken deck package as part of the order.



The plywood we use it the correct grade of okoume species veneer which at this time we us from France.

Shipping World wide is possible, two customers from the USA were supplied in 2018.

Roy

Tuesday 19 March 2019

Vuvuzella double scull

We have the plans and can now make a double scull CNC kit for you.



The image is the quad scull.

Contact me for details please.

Roy

Sadler 26 rudder order

We will be cutting a new rudder blank for a Sadler 26 soon, does anyone else want one?


The profile is pre cut and the shape of the foil is outlined, you then release or free off the extra  plywoods and the foil shape comes to life.



We use imported okoume marine plywood and the correct phenolic glue to laminate the plys with.

Shipping Worldwide is not a problem,

Roy

Wednesday 6 March 2019

The launch went off well and the HBYC St Ayles Skiff was in the water

Seen here and in the water for the first time, the ideas on how to move the boat came very quickly.


There was a Scots piper to play the boat all the way from the HBYC club house and into the water.


Tradition has it that the best way to handle  an oar when close to or near another vessel is vertical.


Chris Sutton who did much of the woodwork and assembly of this  new boat kit takes a welcome break and is on the helm.

Roy

The St Ayles Skiff has been on its first trip

Seen here and in the Hout Bay Yacht Club boat park the finished St Ayles Skiff is ready to go again.




Roy

Reinis Navigator build progress

Just in some images and news from Reini who is building one of our CNC kits in Australia.




Hi Roy.

Boat all framed up, ready for stringers.



3 coats epoxy on, all done prior assembling and gluing.




All spars also completed, so coming along fine, reasonable on schedule for an August launch

Regards  Reini


The progress and standard of work really does look good, kits can be shipped Worldwide, the Navigator designer, John Welsford will supply the plans.

Roy


Thursday 14 February 2019

Building our St Ayles Skiff kit in Hout Bay, South Africa

The first kit was started late last year, it has since been built and will be launched in the Hout Bay Harbour on Sunday 17th February 2019 at the harbour slip next to the NSRI Station 8 and at 1400 hours.


Pictures by Paul Tomes of the HBYC.



Ten persons lifted the boat out from its building place under the HBYC club house.


The finished job is a credit to the group who joined hands, funded the kit and built the boat.

Contact me for a kit and pricing, shipping Worldwide is possible.

Roy

Saturday 9 February 2019

British Seagull engine restoration

The Seagull engine has long since gone out of production, those that still exist tend to be in need of spares or in some cases a full rebuild.


Not all engines are in such bad condition as this one!

Your own British Seagull engine can be restored, labour for one like this early 102 series maybe R20,000 or about U$1600, plus spares required and electro plating.


What you get in return will be a collectors item?


Re conditioned motors are normally test run before they are returned to their owners.

This engine dates to around 1963, it still runs and runs well on a 25:1 petrol to 2 stroke mix as the jets in the Amal twin jet carb were changed to allow the leaner mix.

Shipping World wide is possible.

Roy


Wednesday 6 February 2019

Having fun in the USA building our Optimist kit

We shipped an Optimist kit out to Stuart in the USA last November, some pictures have arrived showing the family and the kit.



The little lad is a regular in the garage it seems.



All this work means its time for a sleep for this little man.


It will be fun watching the build progress and then the grandchild can start to learn to sail.

Roy

Monday 28 January 2019

B&G Network Speed transducer

This one requires a new paddle but is otherwise in working condition.


A replacement paddle can also be supplied.

There is also a selection of the various Network instruments.

Contact me for pricing.

Roy

Sunday 13 January 2019

Folk style Harp offer

I posted about a Harp that is being made locally, today the strings were fitted and the sounds from those strings really do sound good.


A qualified engineer made this instrument and the quality is easy to see.


The tuning levers have still to be fastened in place.



While this harp has been made for the makers personal use, more can be produced and to forward orders, shipping Worldwide is not a problem.



Please contact me to discuss your order and pricing.

Roy

Shipping to the USA

One of the kits that we sent to the USA last year was an Optimist kit, that included the North Sail and Harken deck gear.


The 4 and 5 year old granddaughters keep bailing while 2 year old grandson Elliott is hanging in with me.

Already thinking about next kit boat,

Best regards,

Stuart 

Patrick collects his British Seagull motor

Good Evening Roy



Thank you for the opportunity to purchase such a classic restored workhorse
Will keep you posted on her performance

Regards
Patrick

The British Seagull in question was in a box of loose parts which I selected from to make the motor that Patrick now owns. It dates to 1962/ 63 and will be a 5hp model.

The container that I am holding is the Castrol 140 grade gear oil, I still have a few left in stock if anyone wants some?

Roy