aircoffee

Here is a little update on the Saginaw. I have two 550 motors with water jackets installed. I'm using a Battler's Connection gearbox to run two motors into one shaft. The ship now has a 3" 4-blade prop. The rudder is installed, made from plywood and is 3" x 4". I'm using a 1/4 scale Hitec servo for the rudder control. The bow thruster is installed and I'm wiring it to react with the rudder, using a 3 way switch to allow the thruster to coordinate or crab thrust. The hull is sanded and primed and I'll be giving it a water and run test this week. Pictures and maybe a video later in the week.

aircoffee

Here are three pictures of the Saginaw at the pond and after. In the picture of the side of the ship, you can see the water line that I marked, the upper line will be the final height of the hull, and you can see where the water actually was with about 90lbs. of weight on the test run.

aircoffee

http://youtu.be/hEHqewTDSyw Hopefully this link works to show my test run on the local pond with the Saginaw. If not you should be able to find it by searching for Saginaw lake freighter.

aircoffee

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEHqewTDSyw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugTH9x_SeIs

Here are two links to a couple of short test run videos. I got wet in the second one.

aircoffee

Saginaw Lake Freighter had a little more work done today. Trimmed the profile of the hull and used my dremel tools to shape the ledge for the forward deck.

foodstick

So cool, I about choked when I saw how much ballast you were using

aircoffee

I haven't posted in a while, but work slowly continues on this Great Lakes freighter. I've been working on cutting out all the deck hatches and installing ribs to allow the hatches to slide open. I am installing a two pump ballast system. Most of the main hull will have an inner and outer hull with baffle holes cut into the ribs of the ship. To prevent internal fouling from pond debris, there will be a mesh screen over the water inlet and then each pump will have disposable inline filters that I picked up at harbor Frieght. This will allow the ship to use pond water for ballast. I will also be installing some KIP solenoids inline between the pumps and the tanks to control water intake to each side of the ship. Each rib section will have an overflow port to allow water out of the ballast tanks once they fill up. My goal is to be able to ballast the ship with up to 10 gallons of water and make up the rest of the ballast with batteries, cargo, and hard ballast. The ship displaces almost 5 cubic feet of water when it's at the water line. I designing the conveyor system, I stumbled on using some wiring channel that I had purchased to hide TV and cable wires in the house. Turns out that channel is almost perfect size to guide my conveyor belt. Hope all are doing well.

aircoffee

Here is a picture of the deck hatches that I'm working on. I slightly goofed. The real ship has thirty hatches and mine has 27. The Saginaw has telescopic hatches, so I'm making these hatches to look like the originals and slide open from the center.

cartix

My Feedback: (5)

how's it coming?

aircoffee

Slow and easy. Been working on a twin ballast tank design idea. The first ballast tank will simply be making an inner hull for the middle 4 feet of the ship, with the left and right sides isolated from each other. A second tank will be removeable and simply sit in the middle inner hull section, about 48" long, 3-4" high, and 10" wide. The combined tanks should be able to hold between 10-11 gallons of water. I'm going to use two large style pumps from Battlers connection, one to fill the tanks and one to empty. To avoid junk in the tanks, the inlet pump with use disposable inline filters to keep the water clean. I'm scratch building an adjustable balance switch and connecting a robbe 6v gear drive pump between the two isolated hull tanks. The idea is that if anything happens affecting the ships balance, it will be able to self-correct. I've also got two robbe auto-bilge pumps that I'm installing, one forward and one aft. A possible long-term dream is to actually run this ship on Lake Superior and carry an actual cargo load from Two harbors to Duluth---- about 35 miles.

side note-- shipping my kid out your way next week. Heading to college at SVA near Gramercy Park.

aircoffee

A few pictures of the on going work. Installing the inner hull that will provide the ship with ballast tanks between the hulls.

aircoffee

aircoffee

Here are my latest pictures. I have installed two battlers connections bilge pumps to run my ballast system. In the pictures here you can see the intake pump draws water in from the bottom of the hull, through two layers of screening. The pump then sends the water through a t-fitting that allows both sides to be filled at the same time. I'm also planning on having an inline filter between the pump and the t-fitting to prevent debris in the ballast tanks. I also have installed a drain plug for the ballast tanks. Here in Minnesota, ponds and lakes are affected by milfoil, an invasive water plant that can choke a pond or lake. So, this drain will allow me to make sure I'm not transferring anything between ponds. The second pump is elevated a bit to allow for a channel under the pump from the ballast tank. This pump will eventually pump out the side of the ship, at or above the water line. It's not installed yet, but there is also a RAM bilge pump in the aft section, I may put another one in the bow.

aircoffee

Had to literally put the ship on the shelf for a while, but I hope to get in some more work this spring. I just received the smoke generator and sound module from Harbor models.

bensid54

Watching this thread! I think this ship will travel scale speed due to the mass of it, so by saying that looks like you better get a couple of tugs to dock it.

aircoffee

I actually bought a 1/87 scale tug kit a few weeks ago. You can see from the two short video clips that I made how wind and the draft of the boat can really affect steerage. I hope to have a few more videos this summer when I'm testing out the ballast system.

bensid54

One of the problems with RC is if you have any wind or waves they have a dramatic effect on any RC boat. For me a calm day is the only time I would take out my scale ships otherwise the wind can take the fun out of your day.

aircoffee

You can see the affects of wind in my first test run. Granted the ship was running extremely shallow, so when the wind caught the ship, I completely lost the ability to turn into it. The nice thing is that the place I plan to run this model is fairly well sheltered. Centennial Lakes, Edina, MN It's a nice city park with a north and south pond including a connecting canal/ central pond area. The Edina model yacht club runs their models at the park. Being 9ft long and weighing close to 250lbs to reach the correct draft, it will be interesting to see how wind affects the steering.

bensid54

Also be interesting to see how the size of that ship affects the spectators. Sounds like a great place to take your ship.

aircoffee

Trying to post some updated pictures. I've been building the forward and aft decks, and I've almost finished painting the hull.

mfr02

Scale weather. Multiply the actual windspeed by the square root of the scale. In the smaller scales it doesn't take much for a gentle breeze to become the equivalent of a Biblical event for the model.

aircoffee

Test tank revealed a flaw in by ballast pumps. I'm going to change out my ballast pumps from battles connection pumps, to actual aerator pumps. The smoke system operates well and I even branched off a little smoke to a side discharge. Trying to create a condensate effect from engine cooling water.

aircoffee

Bow shot

aircoffee

Stern shot

aircoffee

I previously installed a Raboesh bow thruster, but I've decided to upgrade the motor from a brushed speed 400 to a brushless 400 motor. This should increase the output from the bow thruster as well as provide more efficient operation.