Something I should have mentioned in my last post is it was my time working with the crew that restored the Slo-Mo-Shun V that really taught me how to build a radio controlled hydroplane. Roger Newton was, for lack of a better way to say it, a perfectionist when it came to the boat. When a part was installed, the hardware couldn't be damaged in any way as he wanted the boat to look like a museum worthy restoration, much like it's older sister(Slo-Mo-Shun IV) which, after a restoration and a couple of runs on Lake Washington, was put back into it's long time home, The Museum of History and Industry in the vicinity of the University of Washington in north Seattle. Roger even took it so far that, when the deck was installed, it was fastened down with nails and glue as it was originally. To prevent damaging the expensive diagonal cut mahogany plywood when driving the nails, they all had to be left partially undriven. After the deck was totally installed, a couple of people were given light weight hammers and nail sets to finish the nailing process. Roger almost exploded when he found one of the "nailers" had missed a nail head and slightly damaged the plywood next to the nail. It was something that couldn't be fixed as the wood was unpainted so it couldn't be filled and to remove the piece and replace it would cause more damage than anyone would have wanted to fix, even Roger. The hole(which didn't even go all the way through) was left as it was and, when the deck was "varnished", the hole was filled with that so, unless you know where to look, you would never even notice it.
I guess you could almost say that Roger Newton, the father of R/C Unlimiteds, was the person that taught me how to build a scale hydroplane.
Now, with that said, the person that influenced my wanting to build a boat that looked like the full sized one in every detail was another member of R/C Unlimiteds, Howard Price. Howard was someone that would spend days on a little detail that most wouldn't even see. He would machine parts on a 1.5 meter metal lathe or 2 meter Bridgeport mill that would take hours of work to "get right". Like Roger, he's no longer with us but his legacy lives on. His last large boat was a 1/6th scale petrol powered model of the Wildroot "Charlie", another mahogany boat from the late 1950s. The metal work on that boat is unbelievable in the details and to the level of accuracy he put into it.