Good news, everyone! I sprinted back to the Hardware store after work, and my HAM radio buddy that works there smacked me upside the head and told me that I had been looking in the wrong section the whole time! So.... in the four minutes before close, I got two compression nuts, two delrins, and he even showed me the top shelf way in the back of the store where I can get copper tubing. I had been looking in the faucet aisle. it was literally twenty feet from where I was. and they even had 1/4 polyethylene tubing too. so I am going to try those at some point too. this weekend will be fun.
Welcome to the joys of 1/4" plumbing. FYI, that polyethylene tubing is not pressure rated and is no good for plastic mags. The 1/4" ID stuff makes great barrel protectors though.
Having used the 1/4" polyethylene for both barrel protection and magazines it works for both. The only issue I ever had was after a few years the magazine would fail, but it's super cheap and easy to cut a new one so I just replaced them occasionally and that stopped them from failing at an event. I personally disliked them as I find rigid magazines more helpful when mounting the cannon and keeping it secure. Ymmv
Thanks for the heads up, Steve. I'll make an order for the plastic stuff sometime next month. I have the compression nuts and plastic grabber things to make your PTC terminal, and a good brass end fitting for the mag, but where do you get those PTC to 10-32 ends that you have for your mag ends? Going to spend part of friday building a standard mag with what I have. the plastic experiments will be next month's adventure. Hopefully I'll be able to get on a fire later this summer and put a mondo kicker on my paycheck by working 16 hour days for 14 days straight with overtime and a 20% hazardous duty pay upgrade. Then I'll really trick out the boat AND get a fair chunk of change for a down payment on a house.
They are just PTC caps drilled and tapped for 10-32 theads. The best source I've found for them is PneumaticPlus. http://www.pneumaticplus.com/push-to-connect-fitting-cap/
rad. If I get to that point, I'll get some and mail them to you with something Wisconsin-ish as payment for drilling&tapping
so far, so good. put two compression fittings on the receiver (Tee), and about to put the elbow on. elbow is getting solder, since I already have a degree of rotation on the bottom.
Success! took a minute to figure out that there was a burr on my plastic plunger, but once I cleaned it up, the thing started rip-roaring into my styrofoam testing bin. I'll get this sucker mounted and slap a magnet on the action and it should be good to hook
and now all I need is a good coat of paint for the turret. I carved out a bit of the guts to fit the new configuration, and ended up having to blow through the resin so I put two layers of 1/32 on there to restore the top. But now I have a little over 15 degrees of down angle on the haymaker, which is right where I want it.
took her out on the water tonight to test the weight distro, waterproofing, the pump, and figure out what's going on with turning while astern Weight Distro: Still good-ish. I dumped about a third of my CO2 testing the new gun today so I was a little high on the bow, but the boat performs rather well still. I ended up moving some of the weight to the forward though because the stern was dipping a bit deeper due to it, and the deck was completely awash all the way back to the haymaker when I was going full speed astern. Waterproofing: My deck seal work is subpar. I'd run her full astern for a few minutes and have a solid stream once I stopped. it wasn't much water, but it is enough to have me going back to Steve's Atlanta build for guidance. I'll probably hit it soon. Turning astern: when the stern dives in with the deck awash, it turns hard to port. super tight turn too. even when I throw it hard ovaar in the other direction, it still turns hard to port. I checked the rudder, no problems there. I'm thinking it is either one motor is giving out a lot more thrust astern than the other, or that the shape of the hull is creating an airfoil effect for the following reason--one side of the stern has some waterlogged balsa that indented due to the ram I took at the PPB battle. it wasn't bad until I took it out a few weeks back and the area around the patch got soaked and started bowing in. it's holding watertight, but the contour may be throwing off things. I am debating cutting it out and resheeting that portion of the hull to see if that fixes it. The motors.... she runs straight as an arrow going forward. I dunno. I have the motors wired in a series, and am debating rewiring them this winter to be independent of each other. The Pump: Works great, especially now that I have a screen around it to keep the junk out. at the end of the night, I deliberately swamped her to test her pump out time. She went from full to dry in 1 minute and 16 seconds. I don't know how good that is, but I have a 10 foot stream shooting out of it. I intend to open up the outlet and make the pump more glugg, as my restrictor is down in the pump, and @Bob told me that my copper outlet tubing was like having a second light restrictor. Already have a fix in place for that So. I have a question. When I started out tonight, I got her a good load of water and tried running the pump while at full speed. the results were not impressive, and it seemed that the motors were drawing a lot of amps away from the pump, and its performance would bog down significantly. I have the pump wired directly to the BC board, and run it on a switch on my transmitter. Is this bogging down normal? pump runs fine otherwise. anywho, glam shots.
Hey, Anyone have a preferred way to put the black stripe waterline on their boat? I heard Strike has some tape specifically for it, but wanted to check with you guys beforehand.
I use something like this. Some products stick better than others. I also use it to mark ribs. It is less 'hard' than vinyl pin-striping tape so it has minimal impact on penetrability View: https://www.amazon.com/Painters-PROFESSIONAL-Masking-Stripping-Surface/dp/B01M66W426/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1529773361&sr=8-1&keywords=1%2F4+black+masking+tape&dpID=413Kw9aL0XL&preST=_SX300_QL70_&dpSrc=srch
Its because you are running the drive motors in series, the drive motors should be in parallel. Now when you switch on the pump, its running on 6 volts, and the drive motors are running on 3 volts, splitting the 6 volt battery between motors, if your system is 6 volts. One motor can have lower impedance and draw more current than the other in this setup also, running much faster than the other, which may explain your backing issue. Will not be as noticeable going forward.
