The keel consists of a number of sections of 9mm ply that are glued together rather than a single piece. The supplied instructions suggest that you overlay the plan with something transparent as protection and to lay out and glue and pin all the keel parts to ensure correct alignment.
I found that this was not strictly necessary as the CNC cutting of the parts is so accurate that I could pin the parts to my cutting board along a straight edge and still achieve perfect alignment.

There will be a gap in the keel for the prop shaft tube and this is bridged by the two K6 components. At this stage the instructions say that you should glue the keel doublers K6 to form the complete keel but I decided to do that at a slightly later stage.

The keel is to be attached to the underside of the box and so I carefully measured and marked a centre line on the box. However, before I attached the keel and it’s supporting formers, I chose to drill some holes through the formers so that I could install some styrene tubes from front to rear as ‘conduits’ for motor, battery, servo wiring and cooling pipes so that they are all are concealed under the floor panels and behind bulkheads.

Fortunately, I already had some 10mm styrene tubes left over from a previous project and all I needed to do was temporarily pin the formers together to form a stack in the correct order to ensure they all stayed in alignment and then drill through them all in one go with a 10mm wood bit.

I decided to re-make formers F4A in 9mm ply, as drilling through the original balsa parts with such a large diameter bit would almost destroy them, and the ply pieces also acted as a guide for the drilling.

A dry test-fit with the conduits through the formers on the underside of the box revealed that before fitting the keel doublers K6 they would need some attention as they interfered with the path of conduits.
The remedy was to make a simple jig to enable me to ‘rout’ out a shallow groove in the pieces using a router bit in my drill stand and a guide piece clamped to the drill base and just pushing the pieces through the jig.

I will continue with fitting the formers in the next part.

This is probably the easiest part of constructing the Marlin and having previously built the Thames River Police Boat I’m quite familiar with the ‘formers around a box’ method of construction which is characteristic of the Veron designs.

The base of the box is 9mm ply which is laser etched with planking lines ready for finishing, but I’m going to overlay this at a later stage with another panel that will be planked with 6.5mm wide limewood with .5mm black plasticard ‘caulking’.

The box sides are 9mm balsa and end panels 9mm ply. Before assembly both of the balsa side panels need to be ‘half-cut’ along the marked lines and then glued and bent to conform with the taper of the ply base.

The sides are then glued and temporarily pinned to the base and the two 9mm ply end pieces, formers F2 and F4, glued to the inside face of the side panels.
A quick check with a try square and then it was left to dry.

I’m using Titebond 2 throughout the build, it’s is an ‘aliphatic resin’ (whatever that is!) glue which I have always had great success with.

The next part will cover the addition of the keel and some of the formers.

The VMW Marlin Cabin Cruiser by Robbob

Preface.

At the time of writing, I’ve had the construction of this boat on ‘the back burner’ since July 2022. By then I had spent about two months on and off constructing the boat to a stage where I could consider applying a glassfibre cloth and epoxy finish to the hull. However I couldn’t spend any more time on the Marlin project as I had a more important project to undertake, which was to paint, decorate, refurbish and prepare our house for sale so that we could downsize and move to a new area now that our kids had all fled the nest.

Fast forward to today (mid-April 2025) and it’s taken a while to get the new house and gardens into shape and settle in, with the emphasis on converting my internal garage into a great new workshop, I can finally pick up from where I left off.

Introduction to the kit.

This new model is the latest undertaking by Vintage Model Works, now famous for their very popular models of the RAF Crash Rescue Tender and Thames River Police Boat kits which are based on old Aerokits and Veron designs.

The Marlin is a re-working of an original Veron design by the late Phil Smith in 1953. His son Colin Smith, who was also responsible for the re-design of the Thames River Police Boat, has made some changes to his father’s design to take advantage of more modern materials and production methods such as CNC and laser cutting.
The photograph below is of a prototype built by Colin Smith to give you an idea of how the boat looks in finished form. And there is also a review of the Marlin that appeared in Model Maker magazine, November 1953.

The size remains at 36” and it employs the same construction method as the original. The spacious cabins of the boat makes it very easy to accommodate all the latest control hardware required, not that the original was lacking in that area even when the radio systems used valves and large batteries and the propulsion was usually IC or a large electric motor.
Even the pre-production sample the Vintage Model Works kit supplied to me is well presented with a full size drawing including a pictorial construction sequence and separate pages of building instructions.

All the required materials are supplied in quality ply, balsa, strip-wood and dowel including clear plastic sheets for the windscreens, and various white metal deck fittings. The builder is of course required to supply their own adhesives and paint of choice, as well as the propulsion, drive train and radio control gear. In the latter respect I will likely restrict control to throttle and rudder and not add any lighting or other features. That has already been done magnificently by Mike Turpin.

Construction.

As with the Thames river police boat, another Veron design, construction starts with the assembly of a box structure onto which formers and bulkheads are attached to make the basic hull shape.

I will be tackling this in the first part of my build blog which I hope you will enjoy following and I encourage you to ask questions, leave comments and hopefully some ‘likes’ as I make progress.
Robbob.