Well I’ll be damned, that is a fascinating find! And may very well be the answer Stephen! Can we classify her as a high speed motor launch for harbor patrol or a Fairmile B hybrid? Interesting find no matter the answer, have to love a good mystery.
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Mary wants a Class B now!!! That’s a beauty!
And yes I will keep you looped in on our travels as we are both road warriors. Advice always gladly accepted.
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Dave! These are awesome pix! God’s country out there. Next time hit northern Cali and Utah. Which camper van are you running? Just had to ask.
Next year we are going to rent a Class C to head way up into Minnesota etc. Done towing so want to go up in class. Used to drive a 24’ booze truck from Syracuse to Utica with the labor pool with convicts on work release, so can handle something bigger. 😂😂😂

Museum workmanship Alessandro! It’s an inspiration!!! WOW!
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A sharp looker Martin! Keep the pix coming!
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Nice!!!!!

Here is a download…

https://www.manualslib.com/manual/885170/Graupner-Wiesel.html

Hi Fulmic! This may help a bit…

https://www.cornwallmodelboats.co.uk/manuals/graupner/2145.pdf

Great workmanship Jock! Coming together beautifully. Don’t know what I’d do without my styrene stash! I use CA on it or the Tamiya thin brush on, just keep the CA away from the window clear. It can haze it.
Keep those pix coming!
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I used to think BlueJacket Shipcrafters picked them up, but ModelExpo owns and still markets the Midwest Line Ron. You can grab them from ModelExpo on Amazon too....sometimes even get a deal.
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https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Midwest+Model+boat

As mentioned by Roy. Addendum.
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As mention by Roy.
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The hull kind of reminded me of the old Dumas triple cockpit runabout. I think Roy’s mention of a kit bashed top-sides is spot one. So could def be a one off.
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Love these!!! Thanks for posting them Pat!

Excellent Garth? Did you scribe it?

Well, as some of you guys know, this Bluebird K7 is 100% a 3D print. It is strong as iron and almost weighs as much despite being hollow. The voids are filled with an intricate lattice of ultra thin plastic that is almost impossible to cut as I have adapted it to house a brushless/lipo Traxxas Spartan prop drive system.

I am not sure exactly what type of plastic the gentleman used to print this beast, in addition to being super strong and difficult to cut, it is almost impossible to sand. It’s been a battle.

As for Lew’s question on additional materials, over the years I have made molds and made parts from poured two-part epoxies and used PETG plastic to vacuum-form parts including the canopy of this K7. I am also a huge basswood fan and enjoy using mahogany veneers as well. Not to mention foam sheet for airplane wings.and lest we forget…fiber glass!
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Capital idea Garth! Can't imagine of a better use for scrap 2"x 4's and could not live without Evergreen Plastics! I have a stash of saved styrene.
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Alessandro! They are beautiful. Excellent workmanship here!!!
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Fantastic Ron!!!

And I hear you DW. Our dock and boat have to pulled out of our lake by Halloween. Always a tiresome and somewhat sad time of the year for us.
But it’s good to have something to look forward to in the spring!

In Today's NY Times...

By Sara Novak
Oct. 6, 2025
Updated 7:21 a.m. ET
On Oct. 27, 1915, after being caught and crushed by packed ice for nine months in the Weddell Sea off Antarctica, Ernest Shackleton and his crew abandoned the Endurance and their quest to traverse the frozen continent by land. The doomed ship drifted atop the ice for three more weeks before finally sinking.

For over a century, experts have put the blame for the ship’s demise on an ice floe overwhelming the rudder and creating a large gash in the vessel. But a study released Monday in the journal Polar Record contends that the ship, not the ice, was to blame. The Endurance was ill equipped for its mission, a flaw that Shackleton was aware of long before he launched to Antarctica.

Jukka Tuhkuri, an ice researcher and naval architect at Aalto University in Finland and author of the new study, was aboard Endurance22 with the team that discovered the wreck in 2022. As a side project, he began analyzing diaries, personal correspondences and the ship’s wreckage to find out why the Endurance sank.

A year and a half later he was staring at images of what had been described as the strongest wooden ship ever built in the archives of the Royal Geological Society in London. A hypothesis came to him.

“It’s not the ice, it’s the ship,” Dr. Tuhkuri said.

He noticed that the hull of the Endurance lacked the beams that would have given it enough brawn to endure an onslaught of crushing ice. As a result, the rudder, stern post and part of the keel were torn apart, causing the ship to fill rapidly with water.

Image
A black-and-white portrait of Ernest Shackleton, with some smudges and other imperfections on the print.
Ernest Shackleton during the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, 1914 to 1917.Credit...Frank Hurley/Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, via Getty Images
While Shackleton wrote in his book “South: A Memoir of the Endurance Voyage” that it was insurmountable ice floes that doomed his ship, the study suggests that he knew otherwise. He wrote to his wife, Emily Shackleton, that “this ship is not as strong as the Nimrod constructionally,” referring to the wooden vessel Shackleton took on his 1908 Antarctica expedition.

Endurance, a touring ship built for hunting polar bears and walruses in the Arctic, was “designed to work at the edge of the pack ice but not to be frozen in,” said Walter Ansel, the senior shipwright at Mystic Seaport Museum, in Mystic, Conn., who was not involved in the study.

Not only was Shackleton aware of Endurance’s shortcomings, but he also had the expertise on how to fix them. He had helped the German polar explorer Wilhelm Filchner equip his ship Deutschland with the same structural beams that Endurance lacked. Later, in 1912, Deutschland drifted in the ice-packed Antarctic waters for eight months but survived.

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The paper notes five ice compression events taken from the diaries of crew members, building up to a culminating event on Oct. 17. One crew member, Reginald James, wrote that “the pressure was mostly along the region of the engine room where there are no beams of any strength.” Capt. Frank Worsley described the engine room as “the weakest part of the ship.” Both entries, dated to Oct. 17, describe a ship being crushed by ice because of its structural inadequacies.

The American whaling fleet had repeatedly run into similar catastrophes. In 1876, 12 inadequately reinforced ships were lost as a result of compressive ice near Alaska, Mr. Ansel said.

Michael Bravo, a professor at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the study, said many polar exploration ships were not suited for their journeys. Such vessels were seldom readily available. “Most of them were purchased second hand and adapted as time and money permitted,” Dr. Bravo said.

Indeed, this could have been true of Endurance, suggests Michael Smith, author of the book “Shackleton: By Endurance We Conquer,” who was not involved in the new study. Shackleton may have known that the ship wasn’t ideal for the voyage. But he was restless at home, and struggling with financial debt and a failing marriage.

“The scale of this expedition is truly daunting, but he needed something to get his teeth into and he wanted to get away,” Mr. Smith said. He added that Shackleton was competing with other explorers to conquer the Antarctic.

Still, Mr. Smith doubts this will change our view of Shackleton. Historians knew already that he was a man who took chances and made big calls under pressure. The grave risks of these missions were known to the explorers.

“To be a polar explorer a century ago was an act of faith in itself,” Mr. Smith said.

ROY!!! All so true!
That just made my day!!! Thanks for posting!!!
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Stumbled into the question after a long while and got lucky.
That's always a good way to start the day. 😊

BTW: My kits await as I build this winter sunroom for my wife. Well, it's a kind of wood-working. Just a ton heavier than balsa, but I don't get CA all over my fingers!!!!!
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Hmmmm...Interested to see how this works Bob. Keep us looped in.
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Put my little brother Pete's Suzuki 250k dirt bike into a tree when I was 18. Flew head first through a convenient "V" in the tree 8 feet off the ground. Never got on a bike again. Just didn't have the aptitude or the guts for it.

My brother on the other hand was an artist on a bike and he could take one apart and put back together. He got out of dirt and into super bikes and hung with some of the moto-gp crowd. He was tight with one of Matt Mladin's Suzuki wrenches. They tweaked out his Honda VFR750. It was a beauty! The speed and the size of that monster was too much for me to comprehend.

It was locked in a garage and chained to an iron post set in the cement floor. A determined team of (very strong) thieves got into the garage, cut the chains, and literally lifted it out a high window (that they had professionally removed, even left the window and trim neatly piled on the floor!) and off she went. Damn!

Pete took the insurance money and brought a Ducati; what a gorgeous and temperamental thing that was! He said it took too much effort to keep it running well. But, when it ran well it was a blast. Forgive my rambling.
C'est la guerre!
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100% applies to me in every way too.

I two active builds right now....
Sterling American Scout "Pacific Trader" Freighter is ready to run, just has to be rigged. Vids to follow soon?

Bluebird K-7, still sorting water tests and rudder placement, not to mention learning the finer points of brushless lipo power. Also, concerned about weight issues and scale speed.

And these are currently in the stash.
Dumas Coast Guard Utility Boat, unhappy with it's plans and directions in the stash and will sell cheap!

Vintage Robbe Freighter, Cap Valiente in the stash. The pancake build.
Vintage Robbe Topkapi Cabin Cruiser. Lovely kit. No directions but should be able to handle it.

Chinese Naxos fishing trawler. Gorgeous hull, garbage bare bones super structure. Partially built, but have grown weary of it's lack of parts. Buyer beware when purchasing kits from China. They should all be labeld as "short or partial kits."

And the Queen of my stash; Vintage Sterling Models 42' Chris Craft Corvette. A 4 foot long beast and a wonderful throwback kit. It's so pretty I almost don't want to touch it. But, it's my dream build. So she's on deck for this Winter.
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OOH!!! I like that idea! You have to do it Garth! And honestly love the looks of the Veron Kit. Are they hard to find nowadays?

Oddly enough I have been trying for years to figure out a worthy hull to make a reasonable facsimile of Dr. Benton Quest's research ship from the legendary cartoon Jonny Quest. Here's a couple of screen grabs...
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She’s ready Ron, just not fully rigged yet. That was going to be one of my cold weather projects. I am only at the lake a few more weekends before we have to close up the house for the winter. I am def thinking about it. I may do a run in my bosses pool. 😉

Hi Chum, when I get around to it I will build it for display and will outfit it for RC, much like my (equally ancient) Sterling American Scout that I renamed “Pacific Trader.”

And Ron, I may do a pin pass to see how it goes together. But, my biggest concern will be having as much room in the hull as my Sterling kit has. Interestingly enough they are both 1:100 scale, but the Sterling kit is plank on frame as opposed to the Robbe kit’s slab construction.

However, I must admit that the Robbe kit has a more pleasing line compared to the utilitarian feel of the Sterling ship…below.
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Hey Gang: Well here she is, the ancient Robbe Cap Valiente freighter. And yes, she's a beauty, but open the box and get an extraordinary mound of balsa, that is to be slab built one piece on top of the other.
Then comes the monstrous task of sanding, grinding, and carving to get to get her 50 inches of wooden pancakes into into any semblance of the beauty she deserves to be. smh

Well...at least the box art is nice. I will have to take it out in the yard to wrestle with this much wood... someday.

Has anyone built this old gal?

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Thanks for posting your reply Bob! It's a huge help as I want to try and limit my mistakes. Right now I am still integrating the servo arm and rudder now that the Traxxas drivetrain and driveline are set.
Be prepared for more questions!
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