Hooray – The Tomkat is working again !
Since I still feel rubbish for not making Shipley, I thought I ‘d do one of those jobs I didn’t want to do in way of atonement. Stupid really but I digress. The job was removing all the useful bits from the boat before it made a voyage into the bin.
Pulling it apart I found a loose bolt stuck to the motor but this didn’t look like the problem. Removing it and connecting the terminals to a battery still gave short – or that spark and crack that indicates there is one. I twisted the shaft by hand and tried again. This time there was life.
Sooooo, I reassembled everything and still had no luck. Then I tested to see if there was life from the speed control. According to the meter I connected up the power coming out was reversing even though the voltage didn’t. Good news so far. Still nothing when the motor was connected.
Next I removed the speed control from my new boat and wired it up with the aid of crocodile clips and bits of wire (very useful things croc clips). Everything seemed fine.
The Tomkat control was wired into the new boat (are you following this) and worked. Intermittently. A little experimentation and waggling of wires indicated a loose connection in the plug. At last – a problem I could fix !
So the Tomakt now works with the motor to speed control plug & socket replaced with a chocolate block. A trip to the lake had the boat whizzing around as much as two nearly flat batteries allowed. Enough to show that we might be back in action though.
Fingers crossed, the last round of the competition is next weekend and it would be nice to take part in one leg.
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