and now for the functioning one.. Paint is still a ways off. down angle here is set for 12 degrees off axis. will have to print a spare with less down angle for pure stern.
They are easily pivotable but probably not initially. I'm just running out of time to get it done. I will probably set them to -6° which gets me either straight aft or off to the side and then work on the pivoting mechanism over the summer. Given that at this point it looks like roughly a quarter of the ship's weight will be ballast to boot. There will be plenty of room and weight to spare.
Yes, it just needs me to print a belt drive and mount a servo to the superstructure and it will pivot freely in its current state. But higher priority is figuring out where I'm going to put an extra 6 lb of lead in this thing. As based on how the weight is rolling up currently, I underestimated the amount of ballast I will need. That is on top of the about 6 lb I've already put in
Can you walk through what those screws are doing? I’m guessing there is a tweak adjustment screw in the back?
Screws on the top are the plugs for the fill ports. I went away from regular screws to set screws long ago. A single drop of acetone forms the threads to them so perfectly that they seal great. The screws on the front face are the tweaking screws. What I've done for a long time for doubles and triples is use a single screw for doubles and two screws for triples. It helps ensure that the three barrels are always similarly tweaked. That does generally require you to use some kind of lot control for o-rings, which is frankly easy, I just make sure that the o-rings I use all came from the same bag.
Gas systems in. Time to get the rest of the electrical controls system installed since the power distribution buss is now also done. After that print main superstructure and add about 5 lb of lead ballast. Then sheet. She is sitting at about 26 lb right now...
I just noticed you are using the RC car spicer-style universal joint shaft coupler. Just a heads up, the way it looks like you're using them is not the way they're intended to be used unless the angle is sub 5 degrees. You need two universal joints in the shaft to prevent the joint from forcing the shaft to move in an elliptical pattern as it rotates. (AKA, vibrations, bad noises, thrown U joints, etc). You may already know this, but this is something I've had to point out to a few captains as people experiment with alternative direct-drive couplers vs the older school methods.
Thanks for the tip. The universal joints are on centerline with the shaft and motor. I could just as easily use a splined semi-rigid shaft coupler, but they were conveniently available with 1/8 in to 5 mm sizing. The other thing to remember when one running these universal joints is that you do not want to put an axial load on them.
to be fair, yeah I got some serious instant regrets when I made an attack run on @Kevin P. right under his dual sidemount. what was funny was that I was sitting there plugging away and he just suddenly says "Hey wait, you're not on my team" and proceeded to demonstrate how fast and well-built his dual sidemounts were. but you'd be surprised at how much anger that stupid little boat has to share with the world.
