Starting the dig into the Ottawa Archives and The Great Lakes Museum in Kingston:

Pert was a Robust Class Royal Navy tug that served in both World Wars in several ports along England's southern coast and flew the Blue Ensign. She was constructed by J Thornycroft and commissioned in 1916 then broken up in 1962. During both wars she carried a Navy QF HA 12 pounder gun which was promptly removed at the end of hostilities both times. Her paddles were independent, driven by two double acting steam engines generating 1000 ihp each. She was 178 feet overall, 36 foot beam, 56 feet across paddle boxes, drew 12 ft of water and displaced 1023 tons. My scratch built pond model of Pert was started in September this year. She is 47 inches loa, displaces 40 lbs, is "stand-off scale" at 1:48 and is radio controlled. Her hull was assembled from one inch thick polystyrene in the bread and butter method then carved and "rasped" to shape. The finished hull was sheathed in grocery store flyers and a water based varnish then painted with ordinary indoor/outdoor paint. Most of the deck is glued up or soldered from cardstock, foamcore, spruce and brass wire. The paddle drive motors were purchased from an auto surplus store and were initially designed for window openers . They turn at 180 rpm and draw 2Amps when loaded. Although I own two Spectrum transmitters, Spectrum does not sell a an ESC capable of driving a 12Vdc brushed motor so I elected to buy from a newish RC manufacturer, Radiolink which had the system and parts at a reasonable cost. We shall see how that turns out. The paddles themselves are the simplest design I could build and for that I make no apologies since only a vary narrow part of the paddle is visible when in operation. As I said, stand-off scale Resources were mainly a precious few photos but I chanced on four thumbnails at the National Maritime museum in Greenwich and these have proved invaluable. Additional information is apparently available in the reading room but this requires either personal, or hired researcher, attendance. At present she rests on a drydock module on my Scale 7 (7mm to the foot) model railway but once spring is here I will trim her out at the pond. After a three month build, and almost finished on the build, I broke down and bought the four plans sheets from the museum print service. Cost me more than the entire build! But I have decided to build her again, this time more accurately and build those paddles out of brass. 1. (The paddle motors are in stock (2024Dec29) $10 each at Princess Auto, London, Ontario SKU:9102179) The photo below shows a number of 12Vdc geared surplus motors and other goodies like 12Vdc windshield pump motors for draining our ship's bilge. 2. (The paddle motors are surplus stock intended for auto side widows but are only one hand, as in left and right. Flipping it over to drive the other paddle would cause the gear box to to be high. I had to disassemble one of them to make it right handed or LH depending on your POV and had to remove a plastic keying notch) 3.(The motor gearbox has a long steel square threaded shaft protruding about 4 inches on which it was easy to mount a 2inch length of wood dowel) 4.( The complexity of the paddle is fake ... so many projects so little time. The Westbury Feathering Paddle Wheel from Model Engineer is so appealing but it's a hobby in it's own right. I copied the illustration by JDW and pasted it to my paddles ... sketchy, eh? ) 5.The motors are intended for a duty cycle of about 50% which is 5 minutes on, 5 minutes off. After 30 minutes of running they get quite warm, not enough to boil water but a little uncomfortable to hold. All the same, I get easily bored after 30 minutes driving around the pond.