TOY BOAT

Like every R.C. model I've built, the boat barely resembles what it would look like if I had just followed the plans. It began as a Century Sea Maid kit originally intended to be built as a static model or run on a tether with a 0.15 engine. My idea was to build it up as a semi-fast electric, which meant reinforcing the inside with lotsa fiberglass.

Of course that meant I'd have to scratch-build most of the drive from the motor back (here we go again). About this time I read an article in R.C. Boat modeler (that I haven't been able to find lately) that had to do with flexible shaft drives for fast electrics. I scratched my head over that one for a while, because I had decided from the beginning I wanted a steering stern drive (with full porportional fwd/rev).

During all this I was at a hobby shop one day and saw a Traxxas Villan on the counter (with those little nylon universals) and the light went on! I bought a few spares from the Villan part list (with a bronze Octura X447 instead of the plastic prop) and added some brass from the hardware store and that took care of the steering. That left some kind of gear reduction (most of the electrics used some form of reduction around 2:1). I had gears for my trucks and cars, and a few bearings and miscellaneous items, so I built up a gearbox that I can change the gear ratio from 1.5:1 to 3:1. As you can see in the photos, this puts the motor low in the boat, helping the CG.

I had a spare Kyosho 360 monster motor (which has since been replaced with a Cobalt 13 turn triple), a Novak 610RV speed controller, and a Futaba 2Ch receiver so all I had to do at this point was build a watertight radio box. Then I got to thinking about "where's the heat from the speed controller gonna go?" and decided to water-cool the thing. I made a neat little brass heat exchanger to clamp on the Novak heat-sink, as well as a coil to go around the motor. I've got two pickups (one for the motor and one for the controller) and the two streams of cooling water coming out the transom really help with the scale appearance as it runs along.

All this went on before I put any of the deck fittings or anything cosmetic on the boat, 'cause I figured as overpowered as this boat was I was likely to flip it at least once or twice. As it turned out it's amazingly stable, and has no tendency to flip at all, even crossing a wake or full throttle, full rudder turns. (And I mean full throttle with a 10 cell SCRC pack!) Unfortunately, at this point I discovered the prop was too close to the stern and cavitated too easily, which led to me cutting a "cav plate" of lexan, which I mounted to the transom with Du-Bro hinges and turnbuckles. Made a HUGE difference! From dead in the water this thing gets up on the plane in about 6' (the hard chines I added help too! Not to mention cutting the water very realistically). Future plans include making the cav plate a power-trim (since I've got a JR MAX-4 transmitter built for ground frequencies). Don't know what I'm going to use the fourth channel for...

That left the windshield and so on to be installed. Once more at the hobby shop, I saw an opened Ram headlight kit with one missing reflector in their "grab-box" for next to nothing. This gave me a spot for the bow and a bulb to make the white stern light out of. A red and green LED made a pretty good directional light. It's a blast to run this at night! After that all I had to do was make a tonneau cover to go where the back seat would have been on the real boat (since the kit intended for a gas motor to be there).

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