Charles's blog

On July 16th, USS Missouri set out to engage all opponents upon the Alta Mons Sea. A Reconnaissance Report indicated a substantial minefield (moss) that would restrict Missouri's operational area. While no hostiles were encountered, the day did not proceed without incident.

Missouri was testing out her new more redundant propulsion system, which worked with mixed results: Her starboard engines ran without problem or failure the entire day - marking her first meet that she did not require some form of recovery. Unfortunately, the port motor kept blowing fuses (and still is even on the bench a week later - there is some weird ground short which even took out my multimeter fuse this evening, putting debugging on hold until morning).

So, this week I finally got a working mount for the rotation servo for the re-worked turret mounting for Missouri.

Missouri's turrets are a very odd design (only a handful of this type of turret were ever made), and getting them to rotate reliably has been an epic campaign.

After the better part of a Decade with various amounts of my belonings in a storage unit in Christiansburg (varying between 95% and 5%) today we finally got the last of it cleared out, and the keys handed back to the storage place. My next week's free time will be processing the stuff we brought home today. Included in this are several shelving units and storage boxes which will permit me to open up some more space to work on my various boat projects. Additionally, with the rent for the place no longer obligated, I can dedicate some of those funds to boats....

SMS Seydlitz has been sitting idle for a while, but in the last few weeks I have resumed the process of skinning her. The forward port-side is essentially done, with the aft remaining to be done, and the whole starboard side. Low-hanging fruit is the forward sections, so I skinned the forward starboard side late last week (while waiting for the batteries to charge on Missouri for propulsion testing) which was easy to do, as it is a virtually flat segment (no need to shape the balsa to the hull contour prior to gluing).

So, picking up where my U-joints were when last I posted (see previous blog post, Building a U-Joint)...