Kadet's maiden voyage

On a nice sunny Sunday, the Billing's Kadet took to the water properly. Not the bat this time, real water with other boats and everything !

The model really looks smashing. After a little detailing which I'll mention in a future post, there is just enough complexity to make a plain boat look interesting. The colours have been copied from the instructions and work really well. I'm not sure if left to my own devices I'd have plumped for as much orange but it is right. The blue seat would have probably been black or grey yet it seems to fit the scheme.

On the water we had some issues. Firstly the model had no power and made a terrible rattling noise. Battery life was almost non-existent too. The bow was low in the water and top speed pedestrian.

Returning to the bankside workbench I worked out that the cabin back was low enough to touch the drive shaft coupling. Some work with a pen-knife cured this. Not pretty but effective.

The waterline was sorted by levering out most of the ballast weight I'd put in the day before. With the model in the bath this appeared correct but then unless you fill the water all the way up, seeing the level isn't easy. A small spirit level showed the deck to be level but on the pond this just didn't look nice.

Battery life should just be a case of cycling them through charge/discharge cycles a few times. I've just bought a new charger which will apparently do this for me and get them back in condition. If that doesn't work I'll be looking out for something that holds more charge and isn't much bigger than the pack in use now. While the model isn't supposed to be a speedboat, it ought to move around a bit faster.

On that subject, I did have a spare battery pack and thanks to my whittling the model was quieter and faster. There's work to do though.