Paul Harrison’s Stingray

I had got the bug and decided that I would like to build Stingray in quite large scale as I had loved the shape of the craft since watching it on Tele as a kid. I started by buying loads of balsa wood from a local model shop glued it together and hacked away at it, smoothed it until the shape was right, all the dimensions were scaled up from a plan in the S.I.G. magazine. The cabin was made from partly balsa and fine modelling ply, the fins are the standard type ply, once the shape was correct it had several coats of fibreglass resin to give the surface a hard shell, I have spoken to several modellers since and apparently I went about this the wrong way, but still I achieved the result I wanted, once painted I added some finishing touches such as windows the periscope which was an old phone ariel with a piece of shaped aluminum at the top, torpedo launchers? on the wings and lights in the torpedo tubes at the front, then I made the cabin as near as I could from what is seen on TV as there was no plan for this in TV 21, oh and Troy and Phones were made from toy soldiers, with slight reshaping.

Once stingray was finished I wanted to see it on water, so I then powered her up and fitted her with radio control, she was almost perfect sitting in water for the first time, just had to add some wait at the front, just shows you how great the design was from Derek Meddings, once I could see that it was going to look good on the lake, I needed a Terror/Mechanical fish as well, so I built one of those to, less involved but much harder to get to float.

Then came replicas of Troy and Marina, they stand around 20″, Troy is a artist manikin with a modelled head and hands, clothing etc, and Marina, I made the body as well as the rest, the heads were made from plastacine, the a rubber mould was made and the finally a hollow head from that, dolls hair and eyes

Paul Harrison