Ok, I've finally gotten around to starting what will likely be the longest (timewise) build thread ever! I'm currently working on one of the Russian Orfey class Destroyers as designed by Webwookie a few years ago. Here's a screenshot of his cad drawing: A copy of the PDF plans can be found Here If you decide to build one yourself, a word to the wise.... there is a discrepancy in the shape of the stern which most builders (including myself) found out the hard way. It is supposed to be squared off as in the pic above, but in the PDFs, only the deck is drawn that way. You will need to make some corrections(BEFORE you start cutting!!!)
I have been working on this for a few months on and off and finally have enough completed to attempt a build thread so here goes. It's kinda small. For a scale reference, here is a pic of it on top of Emile Bertin, which is on top of Missouri:
Tugboat, I'm not sure....... whichever is still around when i get it on the water in 4 or 5 years! I'm great at starting things.... and finishing them... eventually... sometime.... in the future..... far far away. Although I have made more progress on this boat that I started in June-ish. By way of comparison, Emile Bertin is the same distance along... after 4 years! And now for our first delay..... I've managed to lose all the pictures I had compiled to post for the thread
Here is the first pic of her on the ways. As those who have already built one may notice, there seems to be a rash of the builders at the boatyard screwing up the shape of the stern!! One of those "what do you mean?.... your'e drawing looks nothing like our part!" moments. The deck will have to return to the builder for alterations.... ummmm.... 3 times.... which is eventually the charm. I believe the keels were also returned for rework..... ummm... 3 times... Here spy photos catch her early in the build process next to.... hummmm..... a SoDak class Alabama!? Just where the h@!! is this shipyard!
Yeah guys, I'm great at cutting ribs and assembling hulls... When I get to the fitting out stage I have so far failed miserably and moved on to a smaller ship each time!! At this rate I might be able to complete a rowboat armed with rocks and garbage before I retire! And yes, if I could ever finish all I've started I could have my own club! Hopefully this will be the first.
OK, it looks like I've lost more pictures than I have, so I guess I will have to make be with what I could find.... Stupid Cyber Abyss!!!!! Anyhow, Here are a couple of the only pics I could find shortly after the basic hull was assembled, kind of caught in the background while I was getting a couple shots of Emile Bertin: It's sorta hard to make anything out.... except that my work area had become a disaster zone.
The stern was a bit of a hassle for a few reasons. One, The shape on the PDF file was wrong, so I re-made it. Two, I didn't like the way that the keel didn't have slots and keys to help it fit together and lock together as I would like, so I re-made it again, and I also re-made the entire bottom plate as well, since I decided it would be better if the bottom plate were one solid piece instead of two like it was on the PDFs. Three, as is the case with a lot of boats, the rudder post needed to go directly thru the keel..... the big problem here is that the rudder post is actually 1/16" thicker than the keel. My solution was to epoxy the wood used to make the solid portion of the stern in place, then drill thru the keel. Seems to have worked out well, and is rock solid. I also had to "clearance" the keel to fit the servo. Sorry for the poor focus : If you look close in this next pic, just below the stern, between the boat and a piece of aluminum (with a tiny allen wrench "pointing" to it)you will see the first version of the rudder servo mount. Of course I re-made it as you will see later...
Since this is such a small ship, I wasn't willing to give up any real estate inside the hull that I didn't have to. I was bound and determined to cram the rudder servo as far back as possible, which took quite a bit of trial and error. Of course the first servo I ordered was enourmus when it arrived. The second one was smaller, but still way too big. The third one was just right. No wonder it takes me forever to accomplish anything. Here is the final version of the servo mount. I just added a slotted tab to engage the keel, and put a bolt in it to lock it in. It's serviceable, but not as easily as I would like. I guess that's sort of the nature of the beast on the small boats. It's a tight fit for the wires, and will be a real tight fit between the back lower corner of the servo and the bottom of the finished hull. It's a tiny servo.... I hope it's up to the task...... It d0esn't look so small in the pic, until I tell you that I used a 4-40 bolt to fasten the servo mount.... I hope the tiny servo gods are smiling on me...
Here is a shot of the top of the servo showing the gear drive. I suppose I should devise some shielding to keep bits and pieces of broken Uritski hull out of them.
An early spy photo of the prototype propulsion system. I say prototype.... well.... because.... you guessed it, I remade some of it.... and changed some components as you shall see later. Hunting down all the necessary gears with the proper diameters, tooth count, and diametral pitch was a severe pain and took me an entire weekend. Ditto on the props, but that only took a bit of hunting here and there for a few days. I was determined to find plastic ones to keep the weight down, but it wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. How on Earth did people do stuff before the internet!! To keep weight to a minimum, the prop shafts themselves are 3/32 stainless steel that I had to thread with an M2 thread to accept the props. The stuffing tubes are super thin wall aluminum tubing to keep weight down also. as shown here, the entire propulsion system weighs in at 104 grams, including the motor, gearbox, props, and stuffing tubes. The motor is around 50 grams of that.
Thanks guys. I do not have my own mill, I do have some limited access to some equipment at a place I used to work at a few years back. Believe it or not, none of the gearbox was made on a mill except for a couple slots and some finishing work. It was all done on a lathe. I will try to hunt down the pictures of it as it came out of the lathe, it's kind of neat. A lot of the cool stuff is yet to be posted. Trying to keep weight down and meet size restraints on this boat led me to do things I hadn't ever thought about
huh? I may be a geezer at 25yo, but last I checked, lathes were for roundy-roundy stuff, and mills were for the pokey square-ish stuff. Since when did that change?
I can make a cube on a lathe. But nonetheless, I was a little confused about what part of the gearbox got worked on a lathe.
All of the gearbox was done on a cnc lathe, except milling it to final thickness and some slots. The capability on some of the better cnc "multitasking" lathes approaches the capability of their cnc mill counterparts in a lot of ways. They even exceed them in others, and some of the better ones can actually mill taking heavier cuts and providing a better surface finish than some mid to lower range cnc mills. On top of that, imagine building complex parts that have numerous features that have to be held in close tolerance to each other, but are on different workplanes. Like a slot on one side that has to be perfectly centered to thru bore on the end. If it is all done at once, there is no reclamping of the part, so your reference points never change, as long as the machine alignment is good, all locations will be spot on - without ever having to re-indicate a part in or re-pick up and edge or corner or bore for reference. Add that to a lathe with a sub spindle that can pick off parts from the front spindle to finish them on the back, and you can drop very complex, accurate, and completed parts out of the machine in 1 operation, because with a setup like this you can access every single side on the part without ever touching it. Its cool stuff! I'll find a few pictures and post them. If I were interested in doing more programming and set up, I could have easily done the gearboxes without any secondary operations, but with the limited access I have on a weekend here or there, I always design my stuff with ease of set up in mind so I can get in and out quickly without disturbing any more of the companys production than necessary. I will often mill holes instead of drilling them if I will already have the necessary mill in for other features. I usually don't tap the holes in the machine just for ease of set up.
Here we go. I actually found both halves of the gearbox as they were dropped out of the lathe in 1 operation. I then finished them up, mostly just on a drill press, and it looks like I saw cut the slots. The only thing I can think of that was done on a mill is to mill them to final thickness. It looks like to make both of these parts I only had to add 2 tools that aren't usually in the lathe - a 1/8 end mill and a .098 drill (I think). The larger holes were milled to size with the end mill, so I only needed 1 tool to do the entire profile and make 3 different sized holes. The small holes were all drilled to the pre drill size for a 4-40 tap, any holes I needed to be a different size were opened up later. I do this type of thing often to make a super fast setup. Even though some of the holes needed to be bigger for clearance holes for the 4-40 bolts to go through, at least they are properly located accurately in the cnc so all I have to do when I get home is open them up to the size I need on a drill press. I could have easily done the cross holes also, but would have had to add at least 1 more tool, probably 2, and then would have had to be way more careful during program prove out because mill type ops on the sides of parts cause tooling to be in close proximity to the chuck, and I don't want to take the extra time to watch it that close to keep from breaking a machine I don't own and that they are nice enough to let me use on occasion. I would take the time if accuracy was important, but in this case it wasn't so I just laid out the cross holes later, center punched them, and drilled them at home. The two on the left are raw out of the machine, the one on the right is ready to use. To run the lathe portion, I faced off the bar stock (that tool is always in the machine), milled the profiles and milled all holes I could do with the end mill, drilled remaining holes, then cut off the result (the cut off tool is always in the machine also). Total set up time would probably be 10 - 15 minutes. Run time was probably about 1-1/2 - 2 minutes per part. I was probably at the place just over a hour total that day to do a few of each of these and get the companys machine set back up on what they were making when I got there, or I may have set up their next job if the machine was idle as a thanks for the machine usage. Bummer is I can only get over there maybe once a month, or every other month, so it takes me forever to do anything When the time comes, I have some other interesting things to post. Even more if I ever get around to an Emile Bertin build thread.
