Slooooooow

Sorry, progress is going a little slow these days as I have been side tracked on some other projects. I have however made a little progress by gluing both the motor bulkheads in place.

In order to get the alignment correct I made a small template I could attach to the bulkhead as if it was the motor through which I could pass the stuffing tube so that I could get the bulkhead aligned correctly.

The pictures tell the story I hope.





The bulkhead was glued on one side (side facing bow) with an epoxy resin mix and cotton flakes. When this was dry I removed the shaft and template and laminated the backside of the bulkhead with resin and a CF cloth in strips of about 1cm wide.




I then repeated the process for the second bulkhead.

Motors are here

My Lehner 1940/8's finally arrived so now I can continue the build. Motors are fresh from the factory dated 08/2008 :-)



So the first thing I wanted to do was get a feel for the layout of the batteries and motor with regards to the optimal CG of the boat which according the Hanspeter is 31.5cm from the transom of the sponson. Trying to keep my Lipo's as close to the CG point as possible (if the motors are too far back then you need to move the batteries forward and away from the CG point) puts the bulkhead for the motors at around 9.8cm from the rear flange of the top cover opening.

Note: my bulkheads are the ones Hanspeter sells

Next I prepared the stuffing tubes to give them a bit of an angle so they would mate nicely with the motors's axel and the hole in the sponson for the drives; of course the less angle the less fricition. To give you an idea of the angle I am using you can look at the following picture. DON'T make more than ONE bend. For a brass tube you can bend by hand gently, make sure to have the tefflon liner inserted in the tube.

My stuffing tubes are made from standard 8mm brass tubing into which I will insert some teflon tubing followed by the flexi-cable.



I imagine there are several ways of going about this and placing the angle in a different spot (maybe using two bends instead of one... NOT!!) or making the bend more progressive but this is what I came up with. Please comment of you have a better method or suggestion. The propeller shaft side of the stuffing tube can stick out about 1cm from the transom of you are using the HPR Arneson drives.

The bend in the stuffing tube is at an exact angle so that it meets squarely with the axel of the motor and are exactly inline with the propeller shafts at the transom (this is important), a bit of trial and error is needed here and of course also depend on the distance of the motor bulkhead from the transom.

The final result loosley fitted looks something like this.



If you cut the stuffing tube before hand leave enough length so that it sticks through the motor mount as we will use this for alignment in the gluing phase later on.

Once you have everything fitting nicely for both starboard and port motors you can glue the mounts into the hull.

I will cover this process off tomorrow.

Work of art

While I am waiting for my motors for my HPR 115, which I have heard are now on their way from Germany, I decided to side track a little and build my Duzi Nova R5 helicopter.

What a work of art, just like the HPR 115!!

I let you check out the pictures, need I say more.

Nothing much to report

Nothing much to report at the moment...

I am still waiting for my Lehner motors to arrive and feel that there is not much I can do with the hull in the mean time. I basically want to get the centre of gravity figured out before I glue anything else in the hull. Mainly the front bulkhead, engine mounts and battery support plates.

I did cut out of a 2mm carbon sheet the two battery plates. Its recommended by Hanspeter to not mount the batteries directly against the bottom of the sponsons.
Mine measure 6.7cm wide by 24.5cm long which gives me enough room to move the batteries forward and back to change the point of CG.

Once I have decided on the correct mounting position of these plates I will need to cut a little wedge in the outer side of each plate to get it to sit flat since there is a little hump where the first step on the bottom of the hull is.

I have also observed several different styles of mounting the batteries to the mounting plates, not sure what I am going to do here yet.....




Lastly I have been giving the paint job a thought and have some ideas, stay tuned