I discovered (the hard way, natch) another advantage of dual bottles. My quad-stern setup in Baden froze the bottle, regulator, and main line when feeding 4 fast-firing guns off one bottle (big gas flow ). Splitting guns onto two seperate bottles solved the problem entirely.
Hmmm I don't know... it might be a good idea to run a 20oz tank for each gun that way there will never be a question about air flow. In fact I think all QE ships should run 4 large tanks.... don't you. Muwahahahaha
No but seriously, I ran the Baden with 4 guns on a single 3.5oz tank.. no air for tweaking though... and once in 10-12 sorties I would run out of air. My dual guns ran great and were absolutely ripping when run off that setup. No check valve, no accumulator, two 1/16 hoses from solenoid to gun (Foster Breach hose) and 1/4 inch hose and fittings from Parker. I can say that from Day 1, I have NEVER had a flow issue.. however I now run a 3 gun setup and of course the 3.5oz tank is plenty for a small amount of tweaking and a sortie. Personally I think a lot of it is the fact I run a palmer pursuit regulator/stabilizer with dual 1/8 NPT fittings (4 guns) and now just use a single port on the regulator for 3 guns. In fact I have frequently battled with a frozen regulator and it continued to function as needed with no problems... once I learned how to properly maintain them. Lou, if you only have 4 guns I would save the weight (my suggestion) and run two of the 3.5oz tanks allowing you to ballast lower in the hull. The larger bottles (looks like 7oz to me) put more weight higher in the hull. However those bottles may weigh as much as a 3.5oz, I have no way of knowing. PS - did you find the dead fish we put in your cruiser in Texas... you may want to open the box soon. Yeeeee haaaaaaaaa
Johnny, they are two 5oz bottles so no worries. Hull was built heavy in the keel area to handle stability issues, but we really won't know until the first battle. Practice, practice, practice. What I need is a reliable speed controller. P.S. Fish was tasty, but had a weird axis taste. Maybe the flavor of defeat?
I am using a hamster and a wheel for my speed control and motor.. so far it works great.. but sink once and it fails...
Ah, but remember Jadfer....my Badenuff was firing all four guns at once. (Quad stern layout). That's a whole buncha gas moving at one time. That's why I had to swap my 1x7oz for 2x3.5oz.
If you are going to run two bottles do not mix the air systems. Tim B tried that and the regulators fought each other. I thought about two bottles in a ship with twin sidemounts or quads. You don't really need them in duel/trip sterns. Sterns don't need to get tweaked to the hardest the gun can fire. If you try that the guns will have to match perfectly and that really hard to do. I tweak my trips/duels down in FPS so they all fire together. It's much easier with two than three guns. If you run quads, two air systems give you two sets of duels, much easier to get to fire together. For a duel sidemount ship you want to tweak the sidemounts hard, two systems makes this easier two. With one bottle I never really see ships have an issue with air flow. When it's COLD up here we always have a freeze up issue, but when the water's 35-40 deg and the air is 60-70 deg, that's going to happen. The only time I see air hoses blow is when the regulator jumps in PSI. Mostly poorly maintained Palmers or if water gets into your bottle. Lou remember KISS, I think you are solving a problem that does not exist.
Bob, This is actually KISS, no complicated plumbing system involved. When we are talking about more than one gun firing, there is always the issue of gas flow as it relates to speed and usage. In this setup, only one bottle is being used per gun so there is no sharing of the same gas at the same time. The strike regulators are nice, and 10 oz of air means plenty for a sortie.
And we are back now that a new brushed ESC has been found (IT IS ALIVE!!) Based on Bob's recommendation, I have modified and rebuilt the pump. All parts are SS and everything is siliconed. Assembled, not pretty at the moment but functional
Here is the brushed ESC, it is already waterproof and hopefully will stand up to battle conditions...
Continuing on with the pump, next is to work on the outlet. I am using the tube method with the restrictor about 2.5 inches from the end. In my testing it showed there was not as much downward force on the boat when pumping hard. Your results may vary, but it works for me... That being said, I cut the outlet tube flush with the deck Now I need to attach the tube to the boat so that it does not push the outlet back into the boat, but still be able to be removed if needed. So I will solder a tab and use the 4-40 threaded insert below to attach it to the boat.
The pump orifice should be visible from the outside of the ship without too much prodding and cramping of the neck to see it, the CD will want to check this at every sanctioned event. And yes I have a "Glug, Glug" outlet too and they do work rather well.
No one around here has used a “glug, glug” outlet. I imagine it would also have the benefit of not throwing water all over electrical equipment…. Thanks for showing that. Keith
That is the best part of the "glug,glug" outlet, the water stream out of the boat is of a very low velocity and it will not propel the boat any faster or make it list due to the pressure of the stream or wet the transmitters on shore, and one very important benefit is that the orifice is not exposed to BB fire and being plugged.
Carl, this angle was allowed in the MWC. Now that I am switching to the IRCWCC, does it need to be 10 degrees? I assume that rule is to stop the spraying of electrical equipment or using the thrust to speed up the boat. Is that even a concern with the "glug, glug" outlet?
Not a concern as long as it doesn't spray higher than about 2 feet or so, which mine does with a 600 watt pump pushing.
