A Christmas gift of yore that, like 'Rosebud' the sled, sticks in the mind was a hand-built model plywood boat with a two-stroke diesel not unlike the above. The boat a full three feet long, the engine had to be laboriously started with a length of leather drawstring. When eventually it started (aside some or other lake within one of many parks in Liverpool) my father would launch it from one side whilst we endeavoured to arrest it on the other before its imminent destruction.
Like many such projects, it proved more ornamental than practical and an electric motor ~ with which it was to be somewhat tamed ~ lay for many years in its box.
Firstly, I guess that decades on I'm undertaking that conversion in kind. Secondly it is a reminder that the opening test on water need not require a moveable rudder or indeed a throttle at all.
For like the first torpedoes it could be run at 'full chat' with only a deflector vane to arrest any undue torque and keep it travelling in a straight line.
The difference is too that nowadays there is YouTube, and a moving picture is worth a million words.
