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Old 04-10-2014, 09:08 AM
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Jeremy_H
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Your wife's cam should have a setting to reduce the quality/file size.

Ok, thoughts...Quick ground rules. This is a forum, and the written word carries risk when the delivery is not heard, please understand that what follows from me throughout your build is me enjoying being part of the discussion of your process, not anything negative or intended as rebuke.

There's a lot of dialogue about the right shape for the front of sponsons. Some say curved, some say straight angles. To me it's about what's doing what, so where it's wet under full power it needs to be flat, what's in front of that dictates how it reacts to differing depths. A straight path increases in lift proportionally as more surface area enters water, as does the drag. a curved surface's lift increases exponentially, so does the drag. All of that stuff applied to boats having to penetrate water by design, hydroplanes only do this to get going, so to me flat angled sponsons are easier to make, but any suggested advantage of one over the other is academic because if that area is in the water enough to care about such efficiencies you've got a bigger problem that having the right shape to deal with it! So in essence you've done what I do, curved entries followed by a lift plane which is flat in the wetted area, in my case because I think it looks better and is stronger.

A tapered tub I'm troubled by. This means a lot of the hull pressure will be exiting the sides of the tub, this will be fine if there's enough thrust to simply overcome the loss and the CoB allows it, but I'd need to know your CoB before harping too much on that. Whatever, I'd be looking at parallel personally.

I've noted on a lot of airboat riggers that there's a little too much adherence to established water prop designs in some areas. This works, but two things come to mind which I'm considering for my own rigger project (this is a gift engine I've been given, a small Pylon racing engine, so not in the league of yours). The sponson supports are the usual two parallel shafts, and I think these need to be as high as possible as keeping them clear seems to be something of a challenge even on water propped boats, in my case I'm thinking of arches: . The other thing I've not got to yet is prop protection, One of the quiet benefits of Chris Selph's design is the massive deck which keeps spray off the tub and sponson away from the prop. From my experiences with the little red hydro limited protection means intolerant to rippled water. So I'm coming at this aspect again and methinks those arches are going to grow a bit if I want to be able to run it in other than millpond conditions.
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