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FoxtrotHotel

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Everything posted by FoxtrotHotel

  1. FoxtrotHotel
    I finalized most of the internal electronics and mechanics, and epoxied on the deck. I used a two part marine epoxy to attach the deck to the ribs, and then a waterproof epoxy putty to fill in the gaps between the deck the and hull. The first three hollow areas, which will be inaccessible once the deck is attached, I filled with expanding foam spray used to insulate windows, to help further guard against any water seepage. My planking of the hull wasn't the best, and some of my boards were a little warped and uneven, even after heavy sanding, so I had to fill in some sections with bondo and wood filler. I wasn't able to get the planking to completely meet the transom either, so I ended up using a lot of bondo to fill in the gaps. All the 3D printed parts were made with carbon fiber PLA. If I could do it again, I would have used ASA instead. PLA is easy to print and work with, but it gets very soft with even light heat. For example, putting a model in your car on a warm summer day will warp a lot of parts, which would make transporting this a bit difficult. ASA is a lot more robust and has better heat tolerance.
  2. FoxtrotHotel
    This is a shot of the planked hull, with the basic RC components mounted. This is a small enough model that I might have been able to use a simple servo arm to pull the rigging in, but I saw some models online using a closed chain around drum and pulley, as well as a schematic in Phillip Williams book, Scale Sailing Models, and I wanted to try out a similar design.
  3. FoxtrotHotel
    I'll be posting updates on my build of Joshua Slocum's Spray circa ~1895. It's based on plans I bought online, and I had a friend with a laser cutter make some parts for me, like the hull ribs, keel, and deck planking. However, I'm not following the plans exactly, and I'm converting it to RC, so I'm having to make quite a few modifications. Unfortunately, I didn't think to start a build log from the very beginning, and I've already completed the basic hull without having taken too many progress pictures. I took a break from this project for about a year, but now that I'm getting back into it, I'll try to post more updates. The build uses mostly wood, although the internal mechanics for the RC rigging are custom 3D printed parts in carbon fiber PLA. I'm pretty new to model ship building, so I'm posting this log to hopefully get some advice and feedback. I wish I was as talented as a lot of the people who post here.
  4. FoxtrotHotel
    That's it! Searching "Chapman's water hoy" finds a ton of results. Thanks Chuck! It's good to know who to attribute it to.
  5. FoxtrotHotel
    Any idea what this style of boat is called or what its more formal name is and what its real-world history is? Google only shows the Chinese company calling it a "Chapman" or "aquatic merchant", which I imagine is almost certainly wrong. Maybe that's derived from the original designer's name? I'm no expert, but it looks like some sort of medieval cargo ship used in the Mediterranean or somewhere else in Europe. However, I'm not finding anything remotely close to it in Google's image search.
  6. FoxtrotHotel
    Does anyone know a legit company that makes the 1/50 Chapman Sloop kit? (link removed by moderator) This kit caught my eye, but all the vendors seem to be sleazy Chinese companies who probably pirated the kit, which is probably why it's only being sold on Ebay. However, I can't find any real company selling it. Who makes this? I'd like to buy it, but I don't want my money going to scammers or thieves.
  7. FoxtrotHotel
    It's brand new Bondo resin I bought last week at a local hardware store. I'm pretty sure I just didn't mix thoroughly. I also used it to coat the inside of my hull and that cured perfectly.
  8. FoxtrotHotel
    Yeah, that seems to have mostly done it. Although a side effect seems to be it caused gas or water vapor to be emitted from the wood underneath, and that caused a lot of bubbling and even some detachment of filler between the wood and the resin, so I'm likely going to have to sand off most of the resin and re-fill.
  9. FoxtrotHotel
    I coated my hull with polyester resin. The container said it should completely cure and be dry to the touch in 2 hours, but after 2 days it still has wet/tacky spots, although most is completely dry. The instructions said 1 ounce of resin for every 10 drops of hardener, and I followed that explicitly, but I guess I didn't mix it well enough. What can I do to fix this and get everything dry? I still need to do a little sanding, and can't do that if it's still gunky. Should I wash it with acetone to dissolve the uncured resin, or wash it with hardener to try and cure the remaining unmixed portion?
  10. FoxtrotHotel
    I'm preparing to seal up the exterior hull for a wooden kit that I'm building as an RC model. I've heard some people coat the exterior hull in Bondo's fiberglass resin, which despite the name isn't resin mixed with fiberglass, but resin applied to a fiberglass mat that's then afixed to a surface. I bought some, but the fiberglass mat is 0.2mm thick, which is far too bulky. Does anyone just apply the resin without the fiberglass? My hull is only about 16 inches long, so it's fairly small, and probably doesn't need the extra reinforcement that the fiberglass provides. Is the plain resin too brittle and weak or will it work just fine without the fiberglass?
  11. FoxtrotHotel
    So I ordered some sheaves from Cast Your Anchor, in Toronto. The whole experience reaffirms why I hate buying from small shops, especially outside the US. Their website is a trainwreck, but I managed to place the order. Yet two weeks later, no order confirmation, no shipping confirmation. Doesn't respond to emails. This is why Amazon's eating everyone's lunch. They're the only ones who have figured out how to properly communicate and ship products to customers efficiently.
  12. FoxtrotHotel
    Interesting. That thought crossed my mine, but I didn't think anything like that was sold, much less what it's name would be. I found this on Amazon, but it doesn't explicitly mention any diameters. It just says it's for clocks "0.2 MM Upto 4.0 MM". Is that the outside or inside diameter?
  13. FoxtrotHotel
    That's an interesting idea. You're right, clamping the pre-cut rod would be a lot easier than clamping a tiny sliver.
  14. FoxtrotHotel
    I tried something very similar to this, but the problem is the sheave just spins when I try to drill the hole. The cutout in the stock keeps it centered, but the sheave isn't actually clamped, and it's too small to get a clamp securely on it.
  15. FoxtrotHotel
    I just did this yesterday, based on wefalck's similar advice. It came out ok and functional. The biggest problem I had was both clamping and centering the sheave for drilling the hole. I have no clamp that can hold it well nor get proper purchase, as well as keep the drill bit perfectly centered. I have one of those small desk vices, that I just tilted at 90 degrees and carefully positioned under my Dremel drill press. The result was my hole came out slightly off centered and at a tiny angle. It's barely enough to be noticeable, but it's enough to stop the sheave from freely turning. However, even stationary, it's still far less friction than a plain wooden kit block. Does anyone know how I could reliably drill better centered holes on such a small scale?
  16. FoxtrotHotel
    Thanks for the advice. For this model, I'm probably just going to make two. Maybe another 2 or 3 if I decide to add proper rigging to main boom.
  17. FoxtrotHotel
    I'm estimating the sheave size, as the kit plans don't show them. My kit is Corel's 1:25 Chesapeake Flattie. From the schematic, the block's overall dimensions I estimate are 3mm x 3mm x 4mm, which is pretty close to the small single-hole block provided in the kit.
  18. FoxtrotHotel
    Interesting. I have both a Dremel and a cordless drill. I even have a Dremel attachment for using it as a drill press that can be mounted horizontally for use as a grinding station. However, I'm still not sure I could pull off that size of sheave. It would need to be not much more than 1mm-1.5mm in thickness but the smallest needle file I have is 2mm.
  19. FoxtrotHotel
    Thanks for the log. I've only found this one online store selling sheaves, and their smallest is a tad bigger than what I need, but I might be able to make do. I don't have a lathe, and really don't want to buy one to make my own.
  20. FoxtrotHotel
    Does anyone know where I could find or how I could make a sheave for a functional block? I'm trying to rig an RC model to use working blocks for use with the running sheets, but I'm using the blocks that came with the kit, which are little more than a piece of wood with a hole drilled into it. I've tried to sand it down and enlarge the hole to make it look more realistic and have less friction on the line, but it's still not adequate and routinely kinks up. I'd like to make a true functioning block with a turning sheave inside it, but I'm not sure how to make one on my model's 1:25 scale. I know how to fashion the wooden part and the axle, but the sheave would be about 1mm thick with a diameter of about 2mm, and I don't know how I could make anything that small with enough precision to be useful.
  21. FoxtrotHotel
    Looks really great. The custom winch mount is clever. Do you have any sensors to detect full extension and retraction, or do you let it stall out?
  22. FoxtrotHotel
    Thanks for the advice. I kept the deck, and finished the painting, weathering, and rigging.
  23. FoxtrotHotel
    I can attest to this. The Corel Chesapeake Flattie was my first kit. The materials are ok-ish. No dowels. The instructions said to sand all the spars and mast from square planks, which seems insanely tedious and unnecessary to me considering dowels are dirt cheap and can be bought anywhere, but I'm not sure if that's a prevalent practice among kits. The false deck planks didn't fit the keel, and I had to use a considerable amount of filler. Some planks were distorted or cracked, but most were good. It came with four highly detailed posters of the model in scale, but the instructions were god awful, and were more generally vague advice in broken English. Aside from the box photo and a muddled part on one of the posters, there's no guidance at all on the rigging. Fortunately, a few other users have built this model, and I've been able to use their photos as reference for how to rig it. That said, the kit was still overall enjoyable to assemble, but it was more a puzzle than a kit.
  24. FoxtrotHotel
    The pieces came in a Corel kit, and the instructions say they're brass, but it wouldn't be the first time Corel instructions were wrong. The pieces changed color very slightly after I sanding them down, but only in tiny pin pricks, so it's possible I just didn't sand enough. I tried soaking a piece in acetone, washing it off, and then putting it in the solution, but that didn't have any effect. The patina solution (brand is "Bead Buddy") says it should work for copper, brass, silver, aluminum and bronze, but maybe it's just a bad solution?
  25. FoxtrotHotel
    Mostly finished painting. I really don't like how the deck planking turned out. Is there anything I can do to fix it, or should I just paint the deck white?

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