Greetings: These are pictures of my Sinbin model taken five minutes ago. It was built by motionmodels.com who also built the Finback model for George Bush #41. The model is 20" inches long and custom built to be Sinbin. They'll be glad to build one for you.
How cool is that?!?
Mike
Totoro (Sea Sprite 23 #626)
Thanks. The hull is solid wood, and they took it off the plans found in the manual. Had to send them brushouts of the colors and lots of pictures. They got it right down to the fittings, tabernacle, spinnaker pole, varnish, etc. so that it only Sinbin looks like this model. My crummy photography doesn't do it justice. Took about a year to produce.
20"? What scale do they call this size model? Is 5" five feet?
The scale is about 1.26ft per inch. The mast is about 21 in. from deck to truck. I'm lovin' it.
Checked the motionmodels.com site for an idea of prices, but nothing shown. Can you share what was the cost for your model?
Sure. The model and the packing cost $2730. But wait! The shipping from the Phillipines cost $525. Somebody put their thumbs in the wrong place when they packed it, and the lower inner shrouds were disconnected when it arrived. The makers advised me to find a local model maker to repair it, rather than ship it back and risk more damage. I found a guy by the name of Sid Waller (831 475 7120). He was impressed with it, especially the paint and the packing. Turns out he's been building models for decades and quoted me around $2000 if he was to build it. He wouldn't charge me for the repair, so I sent him a bottle of wine. Then, I had a plexiglass case made for it. Motion models quoted me around $200 if they were to make it. I paid around $275 in Santa Cruz because the base needed some alterations. I sent Motionmodels a picture of the case and they were so impressed that they got the name of Gary's Plastics (831 426 4002) from me for future reference. Mick Podorson (831 427 8073) altered the base to seat the plastic case.
The job took about a year partly because it took a lot of modifications to get the essence of "Sinbin". It's so perfect now that any future modifications will be made on the boat to match the model.
So there you have what became a documentary. I would think that now that Motion Models has done an Ariel they would be able to produce the next one for less money, but what do I know? Just to put it into perspective, I got "Sinbin" (the boat) for $3000 in '94.
Somehow, it just does not seem right that these wonderful little yachts should be worth less than a model . .Originally Posted by sinbin
Yeah, but either way, it's still a blast.
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