Thanks, my goal is the Spring Regionals April 13th but we will find out as we get closer to the date. I'm trying not to "rush" the build, but being an on-call guy 4 days a week and only in the office 3 days gives me plenty of boat time. But I will say over the last 7 days I probably have 40 working hours into the boat. It's almost like a job that I'm paying to do.
I could smash my NC together in a day, but I'd rather be there in the Dunk. Our goal is to be there regardless, so you'll see us. Been a few years since we were at a battle but looking forward to it.
All you would have to do is download the .stl files, configure them how you want them, and get to printing if you own a 3d printer. If not, you could always check around for local 3d printing services or perhaps see if a forum member would print them out for you? I would offer but I have a Gangut I'm currently printing superstructure for and then a Suffren after that, so probably a 3-4 week lead time before I could even start a 2nd run of Dunkerque, and then it would be about a week of 24/7 printing to get that done.
Update. Built a simple, crude, yet effective rudder servo mount and finished my motor mounts. Pics attached. I tried to get good mesh with the gears and the motor mounts are slotted to allow more/less engagement. None of this is permanent, the mounts are only JB welded down to create a form-fit base for them. I will remove the motors and through-bolt the mounts through the bottom of the Hull. I also need to build shields for the gear setups to keep wiring and other debris out of the grindy bits.
Looks good! The only thing I'd change/improve is add some support to your shafts. Maybe a bushing in a block of wood, or just anything to keep the shafts from flexing under load. Having the shafts extend that far out without support can cause all sorts of headaches.
So we took a trip down to the Hayes Boatyard this past weekend to reunite with some old friends and hopefully get some boat work done. We had three ships with us, Dunkerque, Suffren, and Gangut. Dunkerque left the shop with her guns mounted and tested working, Suffren had her foam hull filler sanded to shape and gaps filled with JB weld putty, and Gangut...well we are still not sure on. Turns out the plans we used might not be IRCWCC compliant, which may take some serious re-working to make Gangut legal. But you're here for Dunkerque! Enough about the other two. Here is a spy photo of Dunk post-paint, with guns mounted and dummy barrels installed in the main turrets. The forward most turret is being replaced with a version with notches instead of holes, to make it easier to lift on/off the bow sidemount. For gun layout, I decided to go against the grain a little bit. So, my thought process is, the Dunkerque isn't exactly a very popular ship in the IRC. The Hayes/Andrews clan reinforced that. She's long, she has one rudder, she only has guns up front. Sad trombone, right? The "right way" to fit out a Dunkerque is two sidemounts, one being a 75rd, and one stern gun. That's the way everyone else has ever done it. I was called silly for even thinking of an alternative. Well, that's exactly the reason why I don't want to do it that way. The Dunkerque has a reputation as a bad ship, and the few that have been used have pretty much all had the same gun layout. Now I'm not trying to lie to myself here, I am still very much a rookie captain regardless of my previous ships and battling. The Dunkerque isn't a great ship, she's a battlecruiser, she's got all the wrong hull shape for the sharp turning dogfights in this hobby. So why arm her for a slugging fight that she will undoubtedly lose? And here is where I decided to change up the gun layout from the "logical". Instead of 2 true sidemounts and 1 stern gun, I am going to run 1 bow sidemount that is offset slightly to the rear to try and minimize the "dead zone" where the ship has no fighting ability. On the port side we are going to run a pair of one unit guns right on the 15 degree line and with as much down as we can get. In the stern, we are going to run the half unit stern gun also as close to 15 degrees as we can to port. This should hopefully limit the deadzones around the ship to a slightly more manageable size. My goal is to be a battlecruiser. Engage targets of opportunity, push smaller boats around with my size and thrust while slapping them around with the bow dual. If I start getting into trouble with the slower line ships that can easily clean my clock in a slugging match, run away and re-engage when the situation is more beneficial. The largest threat to this plan is the large 24 second battleships that can deny my ability to run away. NC's, Bismarcks, etc. I won't be able to outrun them and with their dual rudders I won't be able to out maneuver them, so I'll have take my beatings when they happen. Let's face it, nobody is going to have a good time when they get gang-banged by a pair of 24 sec class 6's, so in that department I'll be just as screwed as anyone else. At the end of the day, they say to build a ship you like. I like the Dunkerque and her french Quad cousins, and I'll have fun with her regardless. And hey, if my gun layout doesn't work, all of the mounts are of a type that they will be easy to re-position. I will post more pictures later, showing the gun mounts, magazine loading access, and the ship's recovery float. I am also rebuilding my motor mounts, I am not a huge fan of how they turned out and want to get them perfect. Some hardened steel 32p gears are on their way from eBay to get rid of the nylon Traxxas gear on my prop shafts which I'm sure would've been destroyed almost instantly. Hopefully I can give some good updates tomorrow again. Until then!
This is the important bit in the hobby, some folk seem to forget it at times If they're meshed properly they hold up pretty well actually.
I recommend fighting on the Axis side, shooting at the allied billboards will probably work out much better than trying to hit the axis submarines. Great progress though, it's nice when things start coming together
Yes, building a ship you like and having fun should be the #1 priority yet for so many it seems like winning is the only concern. As for the nylon gears,I am going to keep them as spares, I wanted to re-do my motor mount/gear setup after @Beaver pointed out a flaw with it, so I figured I might as well get some nice hardened steel gears in there since I was ripping out the existing setup. @Kevin P. battle on the axis side?? Whaaaat who would do that?? The Axis u-boats do present a bit of an issue for me and the other billboard boats, but hey, I'll play on whatever team...so long as they can remember that I'm on their side. Had that issue with my Doria...darn trigger happy germans. @Beaver Hope to see you at Regionals, billboards at the ready!
So long as nothing catastrophicly spectacular happens, I'll be there. I just put some of my new Billboard Bustin guns (BB guns for short) in my predread. Test results are very pleasing.
I just read over the IRCWCC ship rules. It seems that having 2 cannons in one turret is not allowed for the Dunkerque. Such a setup would be legal for the Jean Bart and Richelieu, however.
That is true, I am not using that gun as a "sidemount". That is a front quadrant gun at 15 degrees off the ship's centerline.
Ive been working on the Dunkerque off and on, waiting on a few hobbyking orders to ship so I can really get the ship wrapped up. I rebuilt my motor mounting setup using modified versions of 3d printed Traxxas Villain gearboxes, since I didn't want to chop up the actual traxxas units I ordered off Amazon for $8. No great pic of that, but its about as you can imagine. Prop shafts are now well supported by additional bushings in the mounts, and the 28t nylon Traxxas gears have been replaced by 32t hardened steel gears. I had to trim the drag prop stuffing tubes back to get the new mounts as close to the drive prop stuffing tubes as possible. I decided on epoxying the mounts into the ships hull, and in retrospect that was probably a bad idea. It makes them infinitely harder to remove if there is ever an issue, but I suppose if it's done correctly I shouldn't have to remove them. Time will tell if this comes back to haunt me. I did the ships internal armor with some leftover rubber shower pan liner from my North Carolina refit, had it sitting in a roll in the shed. Also started thinking about the electrical lines and pneumatic plumbing, trying to keep everything neat and tidy as I have a habit of devolving into rats nest wiring. This time will be different! Anyhow, heres a pic of the pneumatics and the crappy pic I have of the new motor mount setup. Forgive the overspray on the motor cans, I was touching up the superstructure and completely forgot the side of the boat was wide open...real brain-dead moment. See what I mean about devolving, its like working with a caveman sometimes! After the third "where did I put that damn thing I just had in my hand" any quality is out the window, so I've been taking it slow to prevent that. Tomorrow I am going to work on a support to get the back end of the CO2 tank out of the water channel by a small amount, and will work on mounting and plumbing the rear solenoid. Then I will be working more on electrical stuff. As you can see in the picture of the solenoids I am trying to keep the wiring to a minimum and organized, I am twisting the wiring into pairs more for organization/cleanliness than any sort of interference issue. Most of my wiring still uses the old Anderson 45amp connectors, but I am out of them and will be converting over to the more standard R/C hobby bullet connectors for everything.
Hey guys not a whole lot to update on, in crunch time mode to get everything wrapped up for Spring Regionals. I appear to have undersized the motor for my brushless pump setup, so I ordered a new more powerful 28mm brushless unit from Hobbyking in the hopes that we can get the GPM up to a more reasonable level. The current setup will work well for my wife's Suffren, but her ship has taken a backburner due to hectic inventory weeks at work and lots of overtime hours for her. I prepped sheeting for the boat and put in an entire day of soldering time to make the main wiring harness. In my previous ships I had done a central power distribution bar style design, but on Dunkerque I am going with a main wiring harness that goes from batteries directly to the consumers. The idea behind this is that with a central bus setup I have to modify the leads on every component in the boat to make sure they can reach the supply. With the main harness style setup, I can use a standard lead for all consumer components across all my boats and just make sure the wiring harness can reach them. Makes it easier to swap parts between boats, and makes it easier to "leave the wiring in the boat" when I need to pull a component vs pulling out an ESC that has 18" of wiring spliced onto it. My goal is sea trials Friday of this week, leaving all next week for troubleshooting.
Well, they say that the best made plan never survives first contact with the enemy. It is about to be Wednesday before regionals and my new pump motor has consumed two ESC's it seems. I upped from a 1350kv Propdrive 28mm unit that wasn't quite doing the job to a 2200kv unit and apparently neglected to check the maximum power rating on the new motor...the 60A ESC that I had been using on the smaller motor worked fine until the pump was submerged in the test bucket and actually encountered resistance. Immediate shut-off with no recover. Huh. Tried a 45A identical ESC, same exact results. Welp. Overnight-shipped a 100A no-name unit from Amazon for $20 because it was the best rated they sell and it only needs to go at XX% throttle in one direction, doesn't need to be fancy. I am packing my brushed pump setup just in case. As of right now the boat has still not seen the water and I am about two days behind in terms of boat work. Tomorrow I am thinking of calling out of work just to wrap things up and get a rushed sea trial in before packing the car thursday night. They say that hindsight is 20/20, and for any new people who read this build I have some things I would like to address. First, having looked at more skilled builder's ships and how they build wooden hulls, a major change would be to the basic hull construction. I really should've put a stringer where the bottom of the penetrable area was, as that makes sheeting/finding the penetrable area at all much easier. Also makes glassing the bottom of the boat easier. On Dunkerque I ended up with areas of glassed bottom that sag slightly inward between the ribs, with a stringer there to help hold the glass in place it would've come out much cleaner. Second, the nose of my ship is not quite...right. For some reason instead of a nice graceful atlantic bow I have a bow that curves upwards and then levels back out. Not sure what happened there, but I should've noticed it sooner and addressed it instead of just pushing forward. Third, Deck/subdeck placement. I built my ship using a 1/4" subdeck rim like shown in many build threads and guides here, so that way it creates a narrow lip around the perimeter of the hull for a cap rail and your deck to sit on. In retrospect, I would've rather planned my access hatches better and made the subdeck sturdier with more area/crossmembers. As it stands the entire deck is one large access hatch and while that gives tons of room to access the inside of the boat, I feel like it could look much better with a more...designed approach. Fourth, Drivetrain/Rudder setup. This is a two part. First is the location of the prop shafts relative to the rudder. I located my shafts and rudder in their scale locations, with plans to use reasonably scale items. After seeing the wide fishtail-rudder craze currently gripping the IRC, I realized that I would be at an extreme disadvantage in a 59" long battlecruiser with a single rudder out on the water with other more maneuverable hull shapes running these fishtail setups. I adapted my scale-shaped rudder into a fishtail design but it is not ideal. To be more competitive, I should've moved the props towards the stern to clear the step for the scale rudder. Then, the rudder would also be moved slightly aft and instead of a nice scale profile that fits the shape of the hull I should've made it more of a fat square with equal amounts fore/aft of the rudder shaft, to maximize surface area over the prop during turns. I will say that with this boats first battle rapidly approaching, this has been a wonderful experiment in the world of wooden hull building. I have never in my life scratchbuilt anything off of a set of scale plans like this before. I have rebuilt engines, automatic transmission, I have disassembled Jeeps down to bags of bolts and assorted panels and brought them back up to operating vehicles. I have restored an old Camper, I have done all sorts of crazy stuff but this project has really been the first time I've ever had to translate a 2 dimensional set of blueprints into a 3 dimensional final product. I am looking forward to a good battling season with Dunkerque this year and will report back on it's success (more likely failures!) and what adjustments are made as time goes on. I would like to build another wooden ship using what I have learned from Dunk, but I have promised myself I would stay in one ship for at least a year so that will have to wait for Winter 2018/2019.
