If any other equally sad Contessa owners want to undertake their own modelling projects I’m happy to pass on what tips I can, but I’m not taking orders to make any more!
As for stats., I dread to think how long it took to make; I didn’t keep a record but it was probably about sixty or seventy hours over a four or five week period. The good news was that the most expensive bit was the nameplate (£4.50). Everything else was made from bits and pieces that I found lying about the house. The hull is carved from a couple of bits of softwood joists, glued together, the rigging and guardrails are bits of electrical wire, the cabin windows are scraps of some plastic packaging and the winches are the sprayed hubs of some Lego wheels, pinched from the toybox!
The Contessa website was actually the source of the key information to make the model. I used the line drawings on the “Brief History” page and enlarged them on a photocopier to the right size (1:24 scale fitted well onto an A3 sheet of paper). I stuck the side view and deck plan onto a block of wood to guide the initial shaping, and then cut out the cross-section profiles to use as templates to check the shape as I carved the block. I also used the line drawings for the coachroof profile, which was carved as a separate piece and stuck on to the hull. Most of the rest was done by eye and by reference to photographs, with just a few measurements to check things like the cockpit depth and the shape of the companionway. The model therefore probably isn’t 100% accurate, but even my obsessiveness has its limits.
Jeremy Snodgrass