Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Motor, servo, battery and radio

Boat mechanicalsMaybe I'm not the cleverest boat modeller in the world. I don't understand propellers or motors. Making a slow boat go slowly (or scale speed as we like to call it) is easy enough, but Pilot Boats aren't slow boats - they need to nip along at a fair old pace.

Luckily, I have a boat that does just that - my Club 500 racer. This hull is slightly longer but less broad in the beam. On the Speedline stand, the demo model uses a 540 motor, just like the 500.

So, all I had to do was stuff a battery from the 500 inside, wire it all up and volia ! Working boat !

It's not quite that easy of course, the instructions show a pair of battery packs ether side of the motor but by mounting my single pack across the hull, the results should be very similar. Chopping up the mouldings supplied makes for a couple of retainers each side of the propshaft.

So I wired it all up and switched it on. Whereupon the speed control decided it didn't want to work. More on this later.

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