Retirement full steam ahead

By CATH GILMOUR

John Beauchamp's tidy goatee is fittingly nautical. After 23 years in the Royal New Zealand Navy and a lifetime making boats and steam engines, you'd almost expect him to sport a waxed handlebar moustache, too. Except that would be all fiddle and no function. Not his way.

Beauchamp, of Christchurch, is the proud maker of the city's only steam-powered boat. Each hand-made component has a specific part to play.

It took him three years to make the steam engine and boiler that feeds it.

Beauchamp's fascination with steam started as a boy. During the Second World War, he saved his pocket money to buy and make his first model steam engine. He was always making boats, too, initially by bending bits of scrap corrugated iron.

He joined the Navy in 1950, rising to the rank of captain. Although chief engineers didn't like him delving too deep in their domain, he was welcome to keep a weather eye on the steam engines.

Beauchamp knew steam engines intimately by the time he retired from the Navy in 1973, and continued to read every article or book about steam.

In the late 80s he prepared for retirement, buying workshop equipment and teaching himself to build small steam engines. He built two locomotive engines when he retired in 1994, and these are still being used at the local model engineers' club to pull youngsters around the tracks every Sunday.

"Children take to steam," says Beauchamp. "I don't know if it's Thomas the Tank Engine or what. They're not scared of it."

Next on his agenda were two model steamboats. The largest is a 1.2m radio-controlled replica of the boat he putters around South Island lakes in, the Kathleen.

Named after his wife, the boat is the latest love of his life.

An old man left him a partially completed twin-cylinder steam launch engine. Too powerful for his plans, Beauchamp cut it in half and used this as the basis for making his first full-sized steamboat engine.

Then he had to design and build a boiler to match.The three-year project led him through the doors of many garage sales, engineering workshops and scrap-metal merchants as he collected scrap brass and other pieces.

He made wooden patterns for the cylinders and the pedestals, getting them made in aluminium, cast iron or bronze. By 1997 the engine worked and he found the perfect hull from a boatbuilder living 10 minutes away who had made a fibreglass replica of a late-1800s, clinker-built ship's gig that matched his steam engine.

The next step was choosing a propeller for the engine and to use natural gas for power.That meant developing another engine. So his project last winter was to build a twin-cylinder one.

It takes Beauchamp two hours to polish the Kathleen's brass work, much of it lovingly hand-cut.

It's an image others love, too. Whenever they fire up the engine, Kathleen is surrounded by admirers.

During a Southern Lakes foray, the Beauchamps and Kathleen met her larger cousin, the Earnslaw, on Lake Wakatipu. There was a sense of family. The Earnslaw captain and crew tooted in response, hung over the railings for a better view then, when their shifts ended, pored over Kathleen's impeccable innards.