Today’s job is to try and move some projects on a bit. Ideally I want to finish one of them. With nothing special on, this doesn’t seem to be a hopeless cause.
The obvious choice was “Little Miss Minty”, my model launch. She was nearly complete with even the castings painted. A quick session with the superglue and all apart from the captain were fixed in place.
I then turned to the mechanical gubbins. This was a quick re-assembly of the parts I had taken out before spraying. I even fixed things down properly – OK, the receiver was velcroed into position !
With all this done the battery was charged and a trip to the lake arranged. It’s difficult not to be like a big kid in this situation and want to play with the new toy. The weather was nice and at this time of year that means an opportunity is to be grabbed.
On the water the boat worked fine. Engine noise was a problem, sometimes it was quiet, others there was a rattle. This was quickly traced to a wire from the speed controller touching the drive shaft, not everything is quite as fixed down as it needs to be.
The biggest problem was signal reception. Most of the time everything was fine but about three-quarters of the way through a u-turn everything went odd. The motor would stop and refuse to restart for a few seconds. Distance wasn’t an issue so it must be position. I moved the aerial wire from around the back edge of the hull but this didn’t help. Then I wrapped it around the centre bar leaving the end pointing up. This did the job so I know that I need to make this a bit more permanent than the current twisted wire and second hand masking tape arrangement.
Apart from this I’m happy. Just the captain to paint and fix in position to finish this one. I’ve even thrown away the leftover parts already !
No comments:
Post a Comment