Question of the Day?

3 minutes ago by 🇬🇧 roycv ( Admiral)

Website Related

Early Radio Control Experiences

Hi all, I never throw out servos, just strip out the motors as they are good quality, and/or the gear box. With a bit of cutting of plastic gives a low speed continuous drive gearbox for driving a radar unit powered by a single dry cell. Rotary connection can be with a fine piece length of piano wire which hardly shows. Older servos can be updated with a change of connection lead. Servo lead extension wires are very cheap and with a bit of checking and identifing old servo leads connection. On all rx's that take current standard servo leads the negative is toward outside of the rx case, next and central is the plus or positive wire and innermost is the signal wire. Sanwa have the plus and minus swapped and also Fleet but they went further by also changing the shape of the connector, which in my opinion was just to be awkward. I would cut off the old type connector and cut the extension in half and join the wires as appropriate. Ideally use heat shrink tubing to insulate the soldered joint. Catching up to servos on sale now which in general are more powerful. The small 9 gram servo at around £1.50 each if sourced on the Internet gives half a kilo thrust at 1cm and can operate most rudders on displacement boats on a 750cm hull. For sail winches I use standard metal gear servos with an extension arms. The old sail servos apart from a double drum winch which is still in use at 60 years old(!) is a good one. I had a Fleet sail winch bought new which never worked properly despite the owner of Fleet actually blaming the traffic on the road outside and refusing to do anything about it. Also the 27Mhtz short aerial gave ultra short range as well. The Fleet pre-proportional sets were very good so a bit mixed about them as a manufacturer. The Futaba receivers with lots of coils to set up were too much of a problem but the transmitters were super. Matched with a Micron receiver they were excellent, that was a kit to build yourself and worked every time. I made 3 of them. I suspect that most receivers were really for aircraft and receivers with an electric motor drive had not been taken into account. The old esc's had a large voltage drop 1.4 volts in some cases and the motor drive current had to go through the 2 o/p transistors which means 10 amps at 1.4 volts is 14 Watts of power lost to the motors but dissipated across the o/p transistors as heat and needed a big heat sink. So I do not use these as I can get a 10 amp esc with no heat sink the size of a postage stamp for the price of a servo. The good bit is that everything seems to work together a triumph of all working from the same specs. There are some very small anomolies in servo neutral positions regarding the mark/space ratio of the servo position which could have a 500 microsecond difference. That is why transmitter servo neutral may differ between servos which will need a small adjustment. The transmitted frequency will vary in different countries but virtually all 40Mhtz in the UK came in as 35 Mhtz sets and have a 40 mHtz inserted. Witness my Fleet Plainsman (40 Mhtz) Tx. has a 35 Mhtz label on the base. There is something to check with old electronic RC which is 'black wire syndrome'. I had a transmitter which was a problem, eventually I found the negative wire from the battery pack after stripping back the insulation, was all black. It was basically open circuit. I replaced the wire and then found another and now it works without problem. I am guessing that it is a soldered joint that starts the black wire problem. Most commercial batteries are welded and I have not seen a problem with them. I would welcome opinion on this. Roy

2 hours ago by 🇬🇧 roycv ( Admiral)

General Resources

Brackengarth Tug

A great find Merchant! That is a seriously robust looking vessel and a great project! I seriously suspect that there are some aggressive bulwarks on that tug! Keep the pictures coming!!!

20 hours ago by 🇺🇸 jumpugly ( Admiral)

Building Related

Help is needed guys, Robbe Atlantis

Well done Doug! Ron's friend is lucky as Krick was not always able to save all of Robbe's plans and patterns. I wrote to Krick directly about a plan set for their luxury yacht "Topkapi," but they complained that both Robbe and Graupner had let a lot slide over the years. So my plan set is lost to the sands of time. However, An experienced builder could probably hash it out. When a I ever get to it...we'll see. 👍😂

20 hours ago by 🇺🇸 jumpugly ( Admiral)

General Resources

TVR1A Steam Engine.

I decided to plank the rear section of aluminium plate, in the hope it would look better, and I think it is an improvement. The next step will be to plank the section under the boiler to match. My tip of the day is do not use super glue to stick plywood onto aluminium plate, it does not work, use Evo-stik contact. Regards, Gary.

23 hours ago by 🇬🇧 GaryLC ( Captain)

Building Related