Looking for detailed Sixareen plans

[xv323]

Hi all!

 

I've just registered on this website, having been a lurker for a little while. First confession - I'm from way down south in Hampshire, however a significant chunk of my father's side of the family hails from Shetland originally, and my grandfather on that side retired up to Shetland and lived here for nearly thirty years - for anyone who might by chance have known him, he was the late Jim Henderson of Roesound (just north of Reawick), who sadly passed away in mid-2012 aged 88. I've travelled up to Shetland regularly for all my life and while I can't claim to know it incredibly well, it's more than left its mark on me and in comparison to where I come from originally, I've always believed the islands to have infinitely more character and much friendlier people to boot!

 

Anyway, leaving that stuff aside - our family owns a couple of Shetland model boats which are kept in the islands, and which I have had the opportunity to make regular use of every time I visit, meaning that I have been interested in them for some time. I think they're absolutely the most beautiful wooden boats in the world, and I own and have avidly (and repeatedly!) watched the DVD on the construction of the Shetland Museum's new-build sixareen Vaila Mae, as well as having bought and read what books on the subject of the history and construction of these boats that I can find.

 

It's been a project of mine for a while to try to construct a 3d computer model of a sixareen, accurately 'built' to the correct scale and proportions, as a sort of vicarious form of boatbuilding for someone - me - who has no skill whatever in actual wooden boatbuilding! To that end I've been using the plans I've been able to find on the internet and in these aforementioned books, and I've been able to put together a fairly good rough approximation of a sixareen from these plans (for those interested, I'm using a piece of software called Sketchup, more normally employed for architecture and other such stuff) - in particular, I've heavily relied on those plans that can be found in Charles Sandison's book 'The Sixareen and her racing descendants'. There are however a number of inaccuracies that I know I have committed as a result of an absence of more detailed drawings - the plans I do have are pretty low-resolution and don't clearly show very many of the finer or more fiddly details. I note that in the DVD showing the construction of the Vaila Mae the boatbuilders are making use of some very detailed drawings including stuff like individual profiles for each of the strakes on the boat, so I know that such plans must exist somewhere. Does anyone know if any high-detail, high-resolution plans like this have ever been digitised or scanned into a computer, and if so where and how I might go about finding them? I looked back through previous threads on this forum and couldn't seem to find anything - apologies if there is a pre-existing thread that I've missed - and I have directly contacted the museum as well to see if they can help. Failing that though, any help anyone on here could give would be very much appreciated!

[Ghostrider]

The Museum is probably your best bet, or possibly Duncan Sandison (I think he's a descendant of the author of the book you mention) at the Unst Boat Museum. They're the only two who've built a sixareen in the last century.

[Robert117]

How did you get on with this project? I'm also extremley interested in shetland models and boatbuilding! There is a newer A4 book out, cant remember what its called but its full of details on shetland models and thier construction.