| Boat project |
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| About three years ago (98/99) I had an idea to make a radio controlled boat. After a good bit of thinking about how to make it my brother Ben and me went out to buy a bodyboard (It's a small surfboard that you luy on). We saw some really expensive ones but in the end we decided to go for a cheap one (around 15 euro). I had my brothers 6.5cc model airoplane engine and a radio controll set. So Ben and me started building. |
| The design was very simple (but good). On to the bodyboard we screwed four wall brackets with a board on top (this made the engine mount). We put all the radio controll stuff in a watertight box, with the pushrods coming out of small holes in it. It had two chanells: fast/slow and left/right. It took around two weeks to build. The overall cost to make it was about 25 Euro. It was now ready for testing: |
| We found a small quiet lake, and the weather conditions were perfect. We brought my brothers canoe with us incase the engine went out in the middle of the lake. I started the engine: no problem. Put it on the water and carefully tested how it reacted to my controlls. It handled perfect. I got more confedence and wacked it to full throtle, it went very well. It was really easy to controll. The only problem was the it was quite slow. Sorry that there are no pictures of it. |
| About a year later I decided to make another boat, but this time hopefully faster. We ended up building a catamaran (two hull). We used the same engine mount, warertight radio controll box, and ruder, so there was not much to make. The hulls (2) were made of two 2 litre bottles taped together: cheap and simple. The body was made of 1" x 1" pine beams. It took 2 days to make. It was now ready for testing: |
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| Here you can get a good look at it on dry land. |
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| Here I'm starting the engine (took ages). |
| We put it in the water and carefully tested it at low throtle, it was already going jogging speed, It handled pretty well. I then turned up the throttle. It went just as fast as low throttle. The bottle caps sprayed up water into the engine. You can see it in the picture below. |
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| It didn't work out well. Maybe another year I'll make better hulls. |