The Latest

• Tweet

• Tweet

Hi from the UK Guys,

About a year ago I built a Tiny Titan over here in Kent, England, using the famous magazine plans which I dropped down from the internet. Luckily my wife took a break for a month at a health resort in India, which gave me time to play! After lofting the plans to full size for the more important parts on the day that she left, I quickly went into production mode, first building a scale model from balsa to give me a good three dimensional view of the paper design. The actual Titan build took me almost exactly 52 hours over the course of the month, the construction finished the morning that I went to the airport to collect my wife. Alongside the Titan I also part built a heavily modified Mini Max, which I intend to use for hydrofoil experiments. As the Saucy Shingle /TT magazine plans are not fully detailed, I extemporised some of the details to improve the integrity of the design and to allow a degree of customisation using my own ideas. This was November 2013, and as 2014 was our wedding anniversary year, not a lot has been done further on the boat. However, having decided to do something very special every month of our anniversary year, I have had lots of time sitting on aircraft and in hotels and trains to play around with how to finish the boat, and how to modify the next one to use an inboard two stroke kart racing engine ( starting this one in spring 15 ).  One idea for the TT

UK Titan from SS plans

was to make the steering drum from a recycled ice hockey puck and install it behind the dashboard with the steering cables running under the topsides and appearing behind the cockpit, this works well and looks very neat as the cables are run through the deck using watertight fittings. Having decided to cloth and epoxy the boat, my next idea is to use thin self coloured or patterned polyester fabric under the epoxy, to give an unusual decorative finish without the hassle of painting. I am now looking into the idea of screen printing designs or logos etc, onto the polyester fabric.  Current experiments are working out well in this direction. My Titan build cost was very low as I found some Chinese produced marine ply at a bargain price, so with new transom plate, new kart steering wheel, cables and glass fibre kart seat along with the cost of glues, epoxy etc the boat has only cost £166 GB so far. Due to the vagaries of the British weather, I built it completely on a small trailer so that I could easily get it back in out of the rain. Question is though ~ just how many Tiny Titans have been built in the UK, where most rivers and lakes have an 8 knot speed limit?

Editor’s Note: It’s really gratifying for us at Glen-L to see that some folks are still building our designs using old copies of magazines that were published in the 1950’s-1960’s.

Please be aware that you can save yourselves a LOT of time and trouble by obtaining the fully-detailed plans and full-sized patterns (no lofting!) for all of our designs at our website, as well as see thousands of photos of our boats that have been completed or are in the process of being built. This is a great resource and all are welcome to peruse all that we have.  www.Glen-L.com

Direct link to the Tiny Titan design page here

Direct link to index of all Glen-L designs here