TOPIC: 1957 Bellboy Bikini whereabouts?

After seeing the Bellboy cruiser, I was interested in seeing their brochures in our library and came upon the Ted Jones designed Bikini model. Does anyone know if this boat survived? It seems as though it was the only one built. Cool design that reminds me of the Ventors, Chris Craft Cobra and the Ancarrows of the day with the tailfin. Cool boat!

They built a couple of them then they were destroyed . Not sure exactly how many were made but none survived.

Yes, the molds and the two boats built were destroyed by Bellingham Shipyards. Lee Wangstad wrote an article about the Bikini in "Boating World" magazine, but I don't have the issue date/year.

Andreas

It is hard to imagine destroying molds! It is too bad alot of these treasures are forever gone!

I think it was pretty common for boat builders to destroy the old, outdated molds and tooling. Thompson Bros. Boat Mfg. Co. destroyed all their wooden boat tooling and molds circa 1970 after they ceased making wooden boats.

Andreas

The company didn't want to be responsible for somneone getting killed.

Was that model unstable at high speeds? I can understand if that were the case. Just like the look of the boat and was wondering if the hull design was specially designed for higher performance etc.
I can understand the reason for destroying a mold if there were inherent risk issues....

I can't remember the details, but yes, the boat had stability problems at high speeds. Either an employee was killed, or nearly killed during testing.