It took me a bit to figure this out as referring to rudder gears. Thought you were advocating using Lego gears to fill void spaces and was confused as to why you thought that was cost effective and morally acceptable.
I used extruded polystyrene insulation with a fiberglass coat on top on my Suffren build. Just make sure your resin won't melt the foam.
new power over servo firing boards don't have to have a diode across them and are easy to make a box for and pot them. just be certain not to overfill like i did for one and not be able to use one half of the board. having tried everything else either go with closed cell foam for the water channeling or balsa. pour foam is nice but not for the faint of heart.
Are you building HMS London post-rebuild with the tower bridge? That's my favourite version of the County Class cruisers.
That is the plan. I may go with the triple stack version if I run into problems, but I am pretty sure I can pull off the modernized super. I even scratch built the correct non-bulged hull.
It has been quite a while. But quite a bit has been done. Hey! A barrel holder! Kinda worried they'll get hit and get dinged up along with the barrel but eh, I'll use them for now. I created a turret out of craft foam and shot it up. Eh, i'll use it for now. Bottle holder complete! I poured some smooth on urethane foam into the bow... ...and the stern. 3d printed turret with skewer barrels. And here it is all painted up. Looks good enough for a barrage of bbs to shatter it to pieces amidst the gleeful shrieks of allied captains. I neglected the superstructure for a long time because of how much effort I thought it would be, even going as far as to try and extract it from a cad file I randomly found online, which took longer than if I had just scratchbuilt it in the first place. Ironically ended up scratchbuilding it anyway. I started by marking up a sheet of 1/16" ABS. Gotta add braces for support( plus they look cool)! Used Plastruct Bondene cement to glue things together. Tadaaaaa! Tadaaaaaaaaaaaa! (Sorry for the leg fanservice) The gap is for the pvc tube i'll turn down later. A bit undersized based on the plans but eh, who cares? Internal armor has been added. I got lazy with the soda bottle armor so I used velcro to attach it. That'll smell real great after a couple hours of soaking in the nearest bacteria-infested pond. This looks all fancy-schmancy and high-tech but the CAD file I used went kaput. All I managed to print was the turrets and a couple boats. The magic of 3d printing! (Not shown is the four turrets who decided it was a good idea to delaminate themselves from the hot plate mid-print and make me and the printer very sad) Used the yoga block method (Thanks Steve) with some sandwiched ABS for the dangly bits Mmmm. yummy, if I say so myself. Maybe even tastier than the In-N-out in the background....Wait, are there even In-N-outs back east? Well, most of it is tasty. Except for the mast. Indigestible. How the heck do you drill at an angle through your superstructure without your hole wandering all over the place? I'm looking at you, anyone who's made a Nagato and dealt with the seven pillars of pain. I don't want to ruin my snazzy new superstructure with a couple seconds of gleeful drilling so any methods or suggestions would be quite welcome. Anyway, i'm off to bed.
For my Kongo SS to get the long masts in I drilled holes in each level per the plans before putting them together. I was more than a little surprised that the holes all lined when assembled. One mast slid right in. On another I just had to run a long bit through the levels to clean a couple off center holes. up. If you have everything together already try drilling smaller holes first and getting bigger. Maybe 1/2 the size you need then work up each size in the drill set to what you need. Should be able to make corrections as you go to keep things centered.
As the battle approaches my ship gets closer to completion. Fire directors done. Those are skewers and basswood sticks wrapped in masking tape and covered in CA. Ready to paint Messed up the grass Construction of the rear mast Tadaaaa! Masking truly is a pain. I had to repaint some parts multiple times because I didnt mask correctly. Decided to upgrade to 1 1/4" props instead of the 1 1/8 ones I was using earlier. Instead of grinding away at the hull slowly I got lazy. I think it worked. Yum. Italian stripes are tasty. Beauty shot Went out to the lake to get some driving practice and to work out final flaws. How is the speed and manuverability looking? Turning seems to be better when turning to port. Took this pic as the sun was setting. The test revealed some flaw that might be bad on battle day. The new props are unballanced and cause the unsupported stuffing tube to vibrate and grate against the hull so i'll have to balance the props and add some supports to the tubes. How do you guys support your stuffing tubes? The esc I was using (That 60A $20 waterproof hobbyking one) dies randomly, and I assume it's because there is a voltage cutoff so i'm switching to the servo cam and double switch assembly for forward and backwards. The pump works well but doesnt prime until there is a 1/8" puddle of water at the bottom of the water channel. Turning to port seems better than turning to starboard for some reason.
The boat looks great. Your ESC probably doesn't have the correct voltage cutoff selected. Are you still using the 6V lead acid battery? If so, I think that you should have the jumper in the 'NiMH' slot (based on memory). If you look at the instructions it should tell you, that typically fixes the sporadic cut outs The boat is slow, cruisers should be zipping across the water
I agree that she's slow. Probably close to 28 seconds. Try adding some more pitch to your props as they're pretty shallow right now. That should help with speed and maneuverability. Very nice work though. You've done a fine job. She's quite the looker.
I tested the escs and noticed that they refuse to work on the NiMH setting below 6 volts. Do you run them at 6v with SLAs too? If so do you notice them dying below 6v too?Maybe it has to do with my battery since it's 7.2 AH ?
If youre dropping under 6v under load on a charged battery you are pulling way too many amps in that boat
Let me clarify: After charge, my batteries are at 6.32 volts. The hobbyking waterproof esc operates normally until the voltage drops too low. The measured voltage after the esc ceases to work is below 6v. I assume it has something to do with the voltage cut off which is strange given that the esc instructions say the cutoff voltage is 4.0 for the NiMH setting. This trend was the same for both of the escs I tested. I'lldo more testing to see if maybe one of my settings is wrong. If I really can't figure it out i'll just go with a bang bang assembly and cut down on complexity. Edit: I retested the escs. One is now cutting out at random times. Perhaps I got a bad batch?...
Beautiful build dude! As others are saying, looks like she's running 26 seconds max. Steeper props or more voltage will fix that. Again, congrats on an awesome build!
If you get tired messing around with hobby ESC's, get yourself a Robot Power Wasp (or two). No low voltage cutout or power-on auto endpoint adjust crap. Just a good rock solid brushed controller made for robotic combat. http://robotpower.com/products/wasp_info.html
