HMS Malaya

RE: HMS Malaya and HMS Queen Elizabeth
So in the last post, you saw that the motors, gearboxes, stuffing tubes were all epoxied in place. Today, we had a build session (all 3 of us (Brian K, David W, and I) and got some stuff DONE! Some of this was done at night during the week, but here it is...
I wanted to get the stern waterchanneling stuff put in, so that I could start putting in combat systems and rudders and such. The stern of a QE is not nice flat shapes, and nobody has genetically engineered a balsa tree to grow QE-back-end-shaped pieces of balsa. So I got dangerous The triangle piece of 1/4" balsa got sliced in half down the middle, and fit nicely where it is in the pic. The wierd vertical piece was just there asa spacer for the rudder servo mount and didn't stay there. The gray stuff surrounding the rudder stuffing tubes is metal epoxy putty. it's rediculously strong stuff and has been used to patch damaged warship hulls in the past, and both holds well and is way stronger than the original hull. The sharp-eyed among you may see a bit of it reinforcing the propshaft stuffing tubes.

So, several more pieces of balsa were added to the stern end, and a bunch of little scraps were jammed in there as filler in the Vee of the hull. No pretty, but it's going to be covered over. At this point, I made a little dam of blue tape and poured epoxy on the balsa and painted it over the solid blocks to seal them up.

This pic shows a lot of progress, sorry I didn't get each step on camera. The blasa is no longer funky little pieces (visibly, anyway)... I made a waterproof wood filler from sawdust and the waterproof glue that holds my sailboat together. It's more waterproof than the balsa is. Anyhow, I made a cup of it, and spread it artfully around the waterchanneling. It has some funny colorations right now, but it's still drying. I removed the dam that held the epoxy in place, and you can see that there is now a nice 1/2" high knuckle aft of the motors to help keep the pump primed and stop water sloshing aft The solenoids for the twin sterns are in place, the one for the sidemount goes just forward of the drive motors, opposite from where the firing circuits will be. The blue pump-body-looking thing is in fact a pump body that was standing in for the future printed pump that I'll be using. There will actually be a little printed pump screen that the pump slots in to, that lets me lift the pump out between sorties to check the screen on the pump itself. The little section of deck that is over the aft SS back to the X turret will lift off for access to the pump without any removing-the-rear-deck drama

All this, and my Sunday-scrub-the-bathroom chores took longer than I anticipated, so no 3D printer work got done. Perhaps after dinner!

 

RE: HMS Malaya and HMS Queen Elizabeth The battered-up ship in the background is HMS Lion, my first ship in the hobby. I passed it to Brian K's son, Chris, who hasn't used it in a few years since he embraced the Axis with his Bayern... So recently, Brian gave it back to me, where it will be restored and used as a loaner boat. I haven't driven it since 2004. It was not great (few first boats are), but I have some nostalgia for it

Sitting on top of Lion is a Kent-class cruiser hull that I made a few years ago when I had the mold, and it is now Brian's daughter's boat, to become HMAS Australia.

 

RE: HMS Malaya and HMS Queen Elizabeth
GUNS! GUNS! GUNS! Well, at least the breech and barrels of them I supplied the thick-walled brass tubing, and Brian K cut it to length, and fettled it to be a foster-breech barrel, and drilled out the elbows and fitted the elbows with the breech boost gas line. Here is a pic of the dual sterns (long barrels) and the two sidemounts (shorter barrels):

Below, you can see how such thick-walled tubing can be used in a Foster breech cannon; Brian cut a thin channel around the barrel, and soldered a wire into the channel. This is what the tweaking nut engages to pull the barrel back into the O-ring. He's a freaking smart guy. That's why I keep him around. Other than no one else wants to put up with me on a regular basis...

Below, you can see how frikkin' thick the barrel walls are. It's a little thicker than 1/16" wall thickness. Strong! Heavy, too, don't try this on your light cruiser!

So what did Brian get out of this? I supplied him with enough tubing to make barrels for his HMS Queen Elizabeth! This is way cool and he needs to have hardcore barrels, too

In 3D printer news, the printer is all the way done with commissioning and is ready to print, apart from a minor software issue that I have contacted support about. But everything responds to the software as it is supposed to! Printing will come very soon HAHAHA!!!

 

RE: HMS Malaya and HMS Queen Elizabeth hey tug, is that one of my old cast pumps in there? (I still have the cad around here somewhere, btw)

 

RE: HMS Malaya and HMS Queen Elizabeth
@Dustin - It's way thicker-walled than any brake line I've ever seen. The breech boost line is (as far as I know) a Port Polar Bear innovation from many years back. My old I-boat (first combat around 1994-ish) came with guns that had the feature, and I know that Bob H has made guns with it. Adds a nice kick. Just took Brian and I a while to get other stuff reliable enough that we wanted to try adding them I stil have the old I-boat guns, they'll be cleaned and reinstalled, God willing, in the I-boat's refit.

@Greg - It is! It got modded at one point for a 400-size brushless motor and still worked fine After some turrets, maybe I can print some pumps, in both 550 and 400 bolt patterns. How would you feel about doing a fancy combined-flow impeller for that volute?

 

RE: HMS Malaya and HMS Queen Elizabeth it would be interesting... I'd have to think about how to implement it properly for our very low specific speed....

 

RE: HMS Malaya and HMS Queen Elizabeth it would be interesting... I'd have to think about how to implement it properly for our very low specific speed....

 

RE: HMS Malaya and HMS Queen Elizabeth Tell me what speed you want and it happens

 

RE: HMS Malaya and HMS Queen Elizabeth our problem with our pumps is that we need such an absurdly high pressure for such a low flow rate... that puts us into a regime of Centrifugal pump that is typically run with straight vanes and very poor efficiency (max seen in industry in our range is very low, and for us I would bet on not more than 15% electricity to water, to be conservative for a 4-5gpm pump through a 1/8" orifice). much of this pressure/flow range is tanken up with positive displacement pumps in industry, which we can't use

 

RE: HMS Malaya and HMS Queen Elizabeth @Beaver - the rest of the gun is relatively conventional, apart form a tap to feed gas to the breech boost. I'll weight them when they're assembled, I have all the parts in the shop right now, most of which are assembled.

@Greg, same in the Navy I guess we just work for what we can get within our limitations...

 

RE: HMS Malaya and HMS Queen Elizabeth
Labor Day Weekend means it's time to be laboring on Malaya so she can get combat-ready! To that end, I got the 2" PVC couplers that would become barbettes, and the balsa wood for sheeting! Yes, I could have printed barbettes. BUT. As I looked at the plans and photos available to me, I saw that the plans showed a lot of ventilator stacks that the photographs just didn't have. And the shape of said vent ducts varied from the plans to the photos, and in photos between years (even accounting for major overhauls). So when I fed the barbette file into the 3D printer, and it said '7.5 hours' for 2 of them, I decided that printer time could be better spent on other objects, when a 2" PVC coupler is 71mm OD and I need barbettes that are 70mm OD. Done. When I get a good idea of what the vent ducting really was on Malaya 1943, I will just print the ducts and glue them to the barbettes. So anyhow, the A and Y barbettes are all of 10mm high. There is some variation between plans on this, but they're within 1/8" and I already designed the SS to the Profile Morskie plans and so I went with them for barbette height. The B and X barbettes are 31mm high. With these made, I wanted to get them epoxied last night so that I could work on installing the guns this morning. As good master Bob once told me (and has told a LOT of people), you want to get the guns mounted early as you can in a build, because they can't be moved from where they go. Below-decks stuff can go wherever, but the guns have to go in the turrets. And so last night after a VERY long day of screaming children (and not a single one getting shots to ease my pent-up suffering), I ate dinner, and went out to the shop. Mercifully, I was not so tired as to mount the tall barbettes where the short ones go

Even if you switch to LiFe batteries, the old lead-acid ones still come in handy These ones with paint spatters on them are Brian K's
So, I am off to get breakfast and then to the shop to mount cannons and do other fun things!
*At this point, my recommended course of action is to sit and eat your breakfast in front of the PC, looking through Bob's 'Inside of a Warship' pages on the Port Polar Bear site; I don't mount guns that often, and looking at how others have done it gets my brain in the proper mode for such things. Proviso: Some of the boats were built before some of the recent big changes in rules. Doesn't affect gun mounting, though. Linky: www.portpolarbear.com/reports/index.html

 

RE: HMS Malaya and HMS Queen Elizabeth
Guns are almost done, need to add electrics and sheet. Best case for pump, I complete the printed one and use that. Worst case, I'll throw in a BC pump and be fine.
But initial sea trials in the test basin are tomorrow with Kotori and Gascan in attendance. Gun trials will be next weekend when Brian K is in town and can provide CO2. Battle is the weekend after that.

 

RE: HMS Malaya and HMS Queen Elizabeth
7PM and still going! Starboard side is mostly sheeted. Going to finish it, then do a little electrical work before knocking off for the day. No, the bow sidemount isn't in, yet. It'll get there. I'm actually making really good progress even if it doesn't look it from the pics.