Old Model Boat Kits - Introduction

The aim of this site is to assist in the 'rescue' as many old model boat kits of the golden age of the 1940/50/60s as possible. Long since gone from the High Street, these old kits are getting rarer, and even vanishing from the collectors lists. Many of them are already completely forgotten. We will provide a central resource on the Web so that anyone who gathers any information - plans, box art, company history - on one of these kits has a readily available place to send it, where it can be stored, documented, cleaned up,copyright issues checked, and made available to everyone over the net. For free.

In some ways this is emulating the very successful Outer Zone service which is doing a magnificent job gathering, cleaning, storing and distributing old model aircraft plans. But there are a few differences. For instance, there are thousands of model aircraft plans in existence - we will probably be lucky to find a hundred boat kits. This is just as well, because while an aircraft plan is usually sufficient to build a model, model boat kits often comprised a set of pre-cut parts with the plans being merely assembly instructions. And getting access to these will not be easy...

This site will also stress retaining the history - in particular, finding amd reproducing as many of the old kit ranges as possible. Collecting these will be harder, but it seems important to do this before they are lost forever...

Where we can we will try to recreate the original pre-cut part lines - reverse engineering a built kit where necessary - but this is a much more time-consuming process than scanning and cleaning a plan.

Of course, there will be other one-off plans which we will come across, which look as if they need preserving but which don't fit easily into a model range. We will store these and make them available in the same way as Outer Zone does.

So, welcome to the site! If you have anything you want to contribute, I would be very glad to receive it. I hope that some of the contents will revive fond memories for a few of the older viewers, and encourage some of the younger ones to take up the craft of model boat building and acquire a few fond memories of their own for later use....