my son has just been given this boat by a freind who acquired it ten years ago but never sailed it. we have just retreived it from the farm where it was stored, it was nose? down holding eighteen inches of water. we would like to restore her to her former glory so will be asking for advice later. i don't known much about boats but i am a joiner, there is rot in the prow, in small area of planking and interior strengthing strips?have all perished. any info about boats history and or advice on restoration gratefully apprecited. by the way the boat is in leeds

Hi, you've an interesting challenge ahead. Our Merlin (2981) appears to have suffered the ravages of the damp & rot.
Good resources are Robbins timber (they have most of the wood available - marine ply & hardwood) - though you may have your own sources.
The other is to download the West Epoxy user manual.

I've decided that re-building the keel and hog is rather too much work for me (means de-planking the hull, rebuilding the centr-board case, then re-planking... rather like building from scratch, but harder).

Best wishes for the project,

Colin

Hi Johns - welcome.
According to the year book - 1614 is an Adur 8, built by Adur Boatyards in Sussex in 1963. Those Adur boats were very quick in their day so well worth restoring I would say.
As you may know there is quite a revival of old racing dinghies, and especially Merlin Rockets, at the moment. So if you get her mended and sailing there is plenty of 'stuff' you can do with her.
Being a joiner you are probably better suited for this job than most and I expect you will get loads of advice from this forum - keep it coming guys.
If you choose to join our assocition (£25 per year) you will get the famous year book and a load of back issues of our magazine.There are several recent articles about similar projects and how they tackled them - they all seem of been sucessful but perhaps we don't hear about the others!

Pat
Could 1614 Mitzi 11 be an Adur 7?
I think the first Adur 8s may have been John Murray's 1757 Soltair. Other early 8s included Richard Comport's 1764 Pitta Patta, Chris Andrews' 1834 Cantata and Robert Harris's 1888 Helen Jane.
Robert will probably correct me if I'm wrong!

1764 was Royston Comport. I do beleive that Tony is right and 1614 was one of the Adur 7's with the narrower 'girth'.

were they not all destroyed when they were discovered to be out of class?! if no-one was ever able to race them, then surely they didnt hang around long.

No that was the Adur 6. no's in the 1400's.14???-1473.

The out of class Adur 6's were 1494, 1481, 1475, 1473, 1463, 1404, 1385, 1384, 1362 and 1342. Wasn't it the result of the rise of floor measurement? The Ancient Geek can probably tell us more as I think he or his father was unfortunate enough to have had one of these boats built for them.

Though it doesn't say so I'm pretty sure here is an Adur Boatyard built Merlin on ebay

With a bit of (not terribly clever) detective work and the help of the year book I think this is an Adur 8 designed by J.Deadman and C.Brooks built in 1964 by Adur Boatyard and called Hullabaloo.  Number 1692

The 1965 YB says 1692 Hullabaloo is an Adur 7.

Sorry - misread the book - punctuation blindness!!!  A 7 it surely is

Indeed I did, Robin Fowler came to dinner to measure boat too, the resulting phone calls to Robert Harris who was having the next boat, and Geoffry Saffery-Cooper meant an early trip to Shoreham via the Saffery-Coopers (Just to be sure.) They were measuring the rise of lorr as "girth" an error repeated in an earlier posting above rather than as bean at a point above the keel the former being no real control at all the latter being efiicient.