This Racing Sparrow has seen better days!
I was looking through my Dad's stuff the other day and found one of the original Racing Sparrow prototypes. It's a fibreglass boat made from a female mold. Two boats were made from this mold. Both turned out quite different from the other. This incarnation of the RS boats is built very lightweight. Verging on underweight, the keel bulb is only around 950g. The sides of the hull flex a little it's so thin. It is very sturdy around the keel and rudder and has some beefy internal balsa framing that's glassed in place.
This boat was built with many attachment positions for the sidestays and forestay. This allows me to try different sails and settings. The sails on this boat are a little smaller than usual to compensate for the light keel weight. The radio gear is as per the original eBook. Futaba S3003 servos and 27MHz crystals for radio frequency. The servos still work great, a testament to the ruggedness of Futaba. But the receiver will need changing to suit a newer handheld radio transmitter with a modern frequency like 2.4GHz.
I did see this boat sail, and from memory, it sailed pretty well and was quite watertight. The hatches are clear film taped to the gloss deck with strips of gaffer tape. The poor old rudder has been chewed by a pup West Highland Terrier at some point. The linkages are barbaric, but they did work.
I am in the middle of refurbishing this model and will write another update as things progress. I have updated the radio transmitter and receiver and will explain what I did in the next post.
I will get this beauty sailing again!"