Following the build of my BYMS and the restoration of my Zambezi River Gunboat sternwheeler I was looking for a new build.

Obviously have been aware of the PS Medway Queen so the next project had to combine paddle wheels with minesweeping so HMS Medway Queen is now in build.

I bought a 3D printer in the summer and have had lots of fun printing various trimarans, an air boat and a pontoon boat along with a rock crawler, trailers and a range of model boat fittings. The plan is to scratch build the hull and print the paddle wheels and as many fittings as possible.

I bought a set of modellers plans from the Medway Queen Preservation Society a few months ago and found that some of the dimensions were getting to be unreadable as the plans have been copied many times, this was a major issue with the paddle wheel plans as I couldn't read the dimensions for the wheel diameter and eccentric diameter. After emailing the society to see if they had a better copy they mentioned they had all the original plans in their archive and I was welcome to inspect and photograph anything I needed.

We were on holiday in Kent in September so added to trip to the Medway Queen and had a great day on board and examining the plans, highly recommend a trip to see her - details at https://www.medwayqueen.co.uk/

Back home I decided that 1:48 would be an ideal scale, giving me a model that will 1.18m (3' 10.5") long and big enough to 3D print most of the fittings.

The plans do give enough detail when scaled to 1:48 so I produced a set of 20 body sections that were scaled and printed on orange card, transferred to 3.5mm ply and the full set of sections mounted to the build board.

Currently about half the hull is planked and as I've run out of timber I've used the time to sort the feathering paddle wheels. Had to make a decision to lose some historical accuracy as the Medway Queen has 7 floats on each paddle wheel whereas mine have 8. It's so much easier to work in segments of 45 degrees than the 51.4286 degrees required for authenticity. I'll make the paddle fascias removable so I can change to a 7 float version at a later date.

The paddle wheels have been tested on the bench and do feather when under load after a bit of tweaking to remove friction in the floats and eccentric rods and hub.

Just waiting for more timber to arrive this week so I'll finish the planking, fair the hull and cover with epoxy and cloth. Should keep me busy for a few months!

After a break while more timber was delivered the hull is finally planked. 60 planks in all, has the expected lumps, bumps and hollows so after some longboarding and fairing will be ready for epoxy & e-glass.

Once the hull was fully planked it was time to make it fair and to give it some strength.

With a hull thickness of 1.5mm the hull needs some reinforcement. The first task was to get a base coat of epoxy onto the hull. I used West with 206 hardener, with a workshop temperature of 14-15 degrees this gave a working time of 25-30 minutes.

The base coat had West 410 fairing microfibres added so that the sanding to a fair hull was pretty straightforward and the addition of the 410 allows a good feather edge.

With the hull reasonably fair it was time to do the job I'd been putting off, cutting the aperture for the bow rudder. I doubt this will have a major impact on turning the HMS Medway Queen as it is to scale, but it's an interesting challenge to get it to work.

Once the bow rudder aperture was cut I could start to cover the hull in epoxy and e-glass. To try and make life easy with the minimum of fairing to do at the end of the epoxying process I added a daily laminate, starting with 86g biaxial cloth, then a 48g cloth followed by a 25g cloth and finally a layer of surface tissue.

The West Epoxy has colour granules added so ends up grey, hopefully meaning I don't have to apply lots of paint just to cover the hull colour.

Just need to let the final coat cure then hopefully a thin layer fairing epoxy before cutting the holes for portholes then paint before releasing from the build board.