Use caution on advice to new recruits

I was reading another thread when it was suggested that a new recruit to the hobby could build a fast gun ship for almost nothing. I think the representation here was around $100 bucks.

This is a phrase I hear over and over again. I was told the same thing and it had an effect on getting me into the hobby. However I believe there are certain assumptions that are being made and not shared with the new recruit when making this claim. For example: do they have any carpentry skils, or plumbing, electrical, electronics, or mathmatical profficiency?

It also assumes that you ALREADY have all the raw materials laying around in order to make the ship such as the aircraft plywood, balsa, epoxy, screws, brass tubing, stainless steel tubing, brass rods, radio system, solenoids, cannons, etc.

The average price of a cannon is $30 each so unless you are building a 1 unit ship, and I have yet to meet a new recruit that is, then you will be spending some money.

I also had to buy some tools that I would not normally use in my work such as a scroll saw, drill press (this week), contour tool, calipers, and I already had a band saw, orbital sander, chop saw, and some other items. I still need the talbetop belt/disk sander. Lets not forget the battery charger.

The of course you need all the materials. You need the balsa sheets, usually cant buy just one or two, silkspan - cant buy 1 sheet, epoxy- cant buy 1oz, ca glue, stainless steel screws unless you want your ship rusting, copper tubing for the tanks if you use them, solder, balsa blocks, plywood, aluminium, and so on.

And then.. you need a few spares like a second set of batterys for the second day of battle, spare pump motor so you can continue to battle, spare servos for the rudder, spare rudder linkage..... the list goes on.

So the point is that for a new guy the first ship, in my opinion, is
VERY VERY expensive unless you already have a fully stocked and tooled workshop and I dont think everyone does.

I do agree that now I could just buy some plywood and make a transport ship for next to nothing much like Kotori did. I have everything for it now but a spare radio and I can get one for $50. Even then my cheap ship already has a cost of at least $75 before I even make a cut.

So lets make sure the new guys know that they are in for. Lets not sell them a car for $1 and then they find out it doesnt have a steering wheel and to get one costs $20K. (Thats how I felt)

This is not a rant but I feel it needed to be said. I have heard this so so so much....

Thanks for your time

 

I want to add that I love the hobby and it has taken more than a year to get things together and I am delighted with the the things I have learned regarding the air system (is it pneumatics?), woodworking (I want to make one of those beautiful wooden ships one day), and especially electronics.

I love it.

 

Very valid points. There is always "one more gadget" that is absolutely essential.

 

$100 is definitely low. Point me to the listing & I'll edit it.

However, recruitment is a sales game as much as any other hobby. How many other hobbies are there where the price of the vehicle is only a couple hundred, but only after you break a part do you realize the true cost is in the parts.

A one-or-two unit fast gun ship is a couple hundred turn key, however it is the hobbiest (us) that decides we need a battleship or we need that fancy dx6, or wood isn't good enough... so I'll 'need' a cnc mill.


That being said. I think we should do more to make the cost apparent up front. There was a section devoted to this on the main page; but perhaps it is out of date.


Why don't we give them a range? Tally up (guestimate) the cost of the parts & tools you've spent on your boat & post the type, brief description & cost here.

I'll do it for both the Iowa & the Tirpitz & post a few used (turn-key) ship prices I've seen over the years. Any other takers?

 

I've found the smaller ships CAs to be $800 for everything. Big BBs $1200. I kept track a couple times on my ships and other new guys.

 

Justin if this was in reference to a comment I made. I do not think I ever stated a price, but I know from where I was mentioning on how one could get into the hobby for what one could spend on a certain scale ship. Range price of one of those ships where I live is about $150 to $300 and this person was investing more into the ship than what is cost to just buy. From what he was adding when said and done he would be very close to the Price I spent on my first ship which was a little over $1000. Not that I was saying he should drop his projects and get into the hobby, but instead let him know his belief of the hobby being out of range for him was not as far off as he may have thought.

Now that being said by me. I do agree that we should do more to get perspective people an good listing of what costs could be in the hobby.

 

Let's see. For my transports:
$50 for the hull (plywood, balsa, glue)
$50 for the ESC
$25 for the pump
$50 for a 2-channel AM radio
$50 for other electronics (battery, motor, motor mount, servo, etc)
$50 for miscellaneous (prop, rudder, tiller, blast shields, magnetic deck hold-downs, paint, etc)

And at least $200 for various shop tools like end mills, taps, bandsaw blades, sandpaper for the disk and spindle sanders, etc. While I rarely use all the tools available to me, I'm also benefiting from the advice and help of at least 4 other skippers, so helping to upgrade the shop is a very small price to pay for their excellent assistance.

That totals out to $475, just for one little transport. The Scharnhorst I'm selling has about $950 in parts, and that's not even including the tools purchased for the ship, or the gasoline spent gathering up all those components. When people ask about cost on my YouTube videos, I give the general guideline of $500 for a transport, $750 for a torpedo-cruiser, and $1000+ for a capital ship of any sort.

 

Didn't someone post a rough estimate somewhere that a person could expect to spend around $150 per major component , or something of the like. It seemed essentialy reasonable when you look at the rundown of approximated expenses he had posted. I think it was assuming a fiberglass hull though. Although a very rough estimate, it seems as if it would get people in the ballpark on what they could expect to spend, based on what they wanted to bulid.

I am currently trying to keep track of what I spend on the Iowa class project, as well as the Emile Bertin, but I'm sure I'll lose track.

 

Yes, John Mianowsky I think it was, said that on a big gun ship you could roughly estimate about $150 for each major component or system. For a three turret battleship like Missouri or Scharnhorst that would include the hull, three cannons, bottle and regulator, radio and electronics, and a helping of nuts bolts glue skotchkote connectors and other extra little goodies on the side, for a rough estimate of about $1050.

Of course, many potential recruits will blanch at that cost, so I compare it to a comparable quality RC airplane. It will cost about the same for a top-notch sport plane. However, if you screw up with a battleship, your $1050 is only six feet underwater and is begging you to pick it back up, flush it out, and use it again (and at least one ship has gone through that process for more than 21 years). A mistake with a plane will leave your $1050 spread across a thousand yards of field, and you'll be lucky to find half the bits and pieces to put them in the graveyard.

 

John,

This was not a personal attack. I have heard or seen this in email many times before. I was just reminded when I saw the post. I just thought of how much a 1/350 ship is which would be around $100 but based on what you said that if you had bought 3 or 4 ships then you would be at a thousand bucks(which I missed). I just wanted people to be more aware thats all.

 

Hey!

I think it is very easy in conversation, and especially on the email, to truncate assumptions and be misread. A lot of us don't count the cost of incidentals... but you are right it is a concern.

Sometimes you will get lucky, and somebody will sell something dirt cheap. Sometimes you will luck out and buy a lemon. I got lucky, somebody passed along a sweetheart deal that he got, so we could get a club going. Yup, I scored Randy Kerr's Gneisnau for 600. Yeah, it took a lot of refitting... but hey! I will oneday try and return such a favor. Maybe not that boat, I'm awful fond of it.

There are a LOT of novices struggling to scrounge together a boat... and have no tools. Especially hard hit are the under 18's. I'll bet a thread on the best scrounges would be a good topic. I went through some rough times financially, and scrounged for a while... Printers were my favorite. Printers and junkyard wars

But I probably will blow a lot of total costs of hobby out of the water... I'm on the high end I think. I had an emco maier 3 in 1, and added a harbor freight 7x10, a floor drill press, a scroll saw, a cheap drill press (cheap tools you pay every time you use them) grinders, a logan 9 inch lathe, tube benders (cheap one and one that works), hand drills, dremels (don't drip fiberglass in them), drill jigs, 15/32 tap and die (60 bucks!), hole saws, cirle cutters, forstner bits, brad point bits, taps, dies, end mills, lathe tools, quick change toolpost, insert tooling, tool chests, tool boxes, shop lights, extension cords, moving this shtuff to Ohio, a new set of joists and flooring to make attic storage, entry door, rigging and tackle to move the machines, engine hoist, cabinets, counter top... and it adds and adds.

Dreaming about big battles, and hard to build boats: Priceless!

And the big big cost I just thunked down...

some fairly serious CNC capability...

But I guess at this point it really is fair to say machining is my other hobby


Mike Horne

 

I developed the "$150 Rule" as a general guideline. While it's certainly possible to get it done for less, it holds up pretty well as a general guideline.

I think that if somebody expects to spend $X, & they end up spending even just a little more, they're going to be unhappy. OTOH, if they come in anywhere under the estimate, they'll be very happy. So, I think it's better to guess high than low.

JM

 

For a small gun VDT:

hull kit 230
bottle 3.5oz 59
reg-palmer low pressure 90
cannons 110
TD guns 66
TD pump 34
pump 30
radio 200
rudder gears 10
rudder servo 20
props 21
gear boxes 38
gears 15
stinger 20
drive motors 10
batteries+chargers 300
kips 135
ESC 80
circuit breakers 50
epoxy-west 40
balsa,ss,brass,etc… 50
wire/connectors 25

Total 1633

Hehe thats why I dont keep track of this stuff.

Anyway you could build this ship for a heck of a lot cheaper than the cost listed here, I think the wooden VDT I built this winter was roughly $400 less(not including batteries cause they use the same packs) and works just as well if not better. You could go cheaper still if you didnt use solenoids or an ESC and you used SLAs instead of NiMh batteries.

That was the first ship that I had built in 4 years(poor college student syndrome) so I pretty much gave it a blank check. I wasn't trying to build it cheap either. There were some things that I wanted to have and I was willing to pay for them, such as using NiMh batteries.

Real world costs are higher due to spares and parts im sure I forgot/left out. Also tool costs and screw ups arent included.

Im rather happy with the result, its a good boat.

 

My 2 cents:

Had I not moved to Virginia and instead been able to remain relatively close to where my parents live, I would have had regular access to a variety of shop tools (band saws, lathes, drill presses, etc.) that would have made fabricating the various components necessary to build a combat vessel very easy, requiring that I only have the raw materials and the time. If I had to estimate how much I originally spent on building a destroyer with a wooden hull, not including the radio rcv/tx, servos, and regulator, I'd guess that I spent something between $150-250 dollars. However, this was in an environment where I had access to >$12000 of specialized shop equipment (though friends, family, and the local mechanic about two blocks away) that made it possible to machine one-off precision gears, pump impellers, cut motor stators, precisely wind and assemble motors, mill props from billet, etc. To a certain degree, the costs per ship can be reduced by an increase in the investments made into equipment but I believe a most appropriate way to respond to the inevitable cost question is "About $1000 for a combat ship, depending upon the specific type of ship. Some will be cheaper, others will be more expensive but you should plan on spending about $1000."

 

Yeah, $150 here and there. It's rather surprising until you get the calculator out. Some bits may go over, and some under, but ~$150 is about a good of a ballpark as it gets.

 

Well once Im out of college I will more than likey working for Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Fairchild, or Lockheed Skunk Works.
Making around 100,000 to 150,000 a year. I will probably by two 20 foot by 8 foot 6 by 8 foot container with one 20 ft container as my house and the other 20 ftcontainer as a garage/machine shop. I will buy a day cab semi and a 50 ftcontainer trailor with a generator hooked two a 50 gallon tank and 2 hundred gallon tanks one for black water and one for fresh.
So then I can travel to events spend the night in my house yet still bring my garage/machine shop to repare, store, and fix my ships and help others.
For the 20 foot container as my house I would buy it from www.globalportablebuildings.com

So price would not be a problem

 

If you're going to make that much money buy some land and build a big pond for us to battle in.

 

And then put 5 or 6 of the 6 man bunk houses out there so we have a place to stay.