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.